Star Trek: Discovery has no chill. It’s probably my biggest problem with the show—the way it’s constantly hitting the same three or four emotional beats with little regard to narrative logic, structure, or pacing. I don’t mind a show with big feelings, and there are times when Discovery’s broader strokes have worked for me. “That Hope Is You, Part One” is not a terrible season premiere,and if it’s not the reinvention I was hoping for, it doesn’t immediately fall apart first thing out of the gate. But it’s also pretty much the same show we left behind in season two, for better and worse, and that’s evident even before Michael Burnham manages to reconnect with her old crew and the Discovery itself. This is still a show more interested in manipulating the audience into caring than trusting us to get there on our own terms. That’s a bad sign for any series. For whatever reason, it just feels worse coming from a Star Trek show.
The last time we saw Michael, she (along with Discovery and a group of her friends) was throwing herself into the future to save all life in the universe from being destroyed by a malevolent A.I. named Control. The premiere picks up more or less where we left off: Michael pops up in the year 3188, bounces into another ship, and then crashlands on a nearby planet. The suit is damaged in the process, and there’s no sign of Discovery when Michael uses her communicator, but she is able to send the suit back through the closing wormhole in order to deliver the final signal and then self-destruct.
It’s all very intense, with Sonequa Martin-Green damn near hyperventilating through half a dozen reactions. (Terror before the crash, fear when she uses the suit’s sensors to see if there are any life signs, exhilarated joy when she learns the plan apparently worked, back to panic again when she hears the wormhole is closing.) Given that this is picking up directly after the previous season ended, that rush makes sense, but it’s also a mild disappointment. I was hoping the new season would begin at least a week or two after Michael had arrived, getting to the really interesting stuff without getting bogged down by crossing the t’s of the previous season.
Really, though, that’s a preference, and not necessarily a critical observation. It’s more that the lack of space (heh) leads to an overall feeling of familiarity throughout the episode, that once more, we are right up in Michael’s face for everything, and once more, it pretty much all revolves around her. I never really thought about it before, but while previous Trek shows have had central protagonists, only the original series put as much emphasis on its lead (Kirk) as Discovery puts on Michael. And even then, while Kirk was almost always in charge, that show never felt quite as locked in to his perspective as Discovery is to Michael’s. It’s an on-going joke about how it seems like whenever the universe is in danger, the Enterprise is the only ship available to save the day; Discovery decided to double down and make sure the prevention of the end of all life revolved around Michael working through her mommy issues.
Am I being harsh? I suspect I am; and judged only as a story, “Hope” is breezy enough. I like Book, the courier whose ship Michael rams into when she arrives in the future. He’s very clearly being set up as a potential new love interest—they start off as antagonists, they’re forced to fight together, he turns out to be a super upstanding dude and he takes his shirt off at one point—which is fine; even better, he’s got his own agenda, and is sarcastic to Michael, which is appreciated, even if she’s already managed to win him over to her point of view by the end of the episode. There’s some fun “monster” stuff; when Michael runs into Book, he’s in the act of liberating a giant slug beastie, and we get to see the beastie in action as it chows down on all the bad guys before being delivered to its new home. The idea that the Federation has completely collapsed has some promise, as it means that the Discovery is going to need to chart its own course going forward, and it’s arguably the biggest break from previous Trek shows.
It’s just, well, we’re barely into season three, and already Michael has made contact with a former Federation outpost, and is making plans to bring the whole system back. She’s seen, what, two locations? It’s possible that the future is a depressing hellscape in desperate need of some uplift, and the city on the planet where she crashlands (which is apparently the only city on a planet largely devoid of habitation; does no one commute?) isn’t exactly a haven of law and order. I also don’t expect the season to give us a clear and complete picture of everything right off the bat, especially not if it’s choosing to stick this closely with Michael in its premiere. But some context would be nice.
As is, it’s just another one of Discovery’s “uplifting” moments where inspirational music plays and Michael gets that determined look in her eyes, and we’re supposed to be inspired as though just the act of believing in something is heroic, without regard to what that something means. The Federation wasn’t a perfect organization. It wasn’t so bad it deserved to be destroyed, but it also wasn’t King Arthur and Camelot. And apart from a few scattered comments from Book (apparently dilithium is a lot rarer now, so I guess Discovery’s spore drive is going to central once again), we don’t know what 3188 is really like. We don’t know if it needs the Federation. This isn’t even a bad set-up for a season-long arc, it’s just so quick to assume we’ll automatically care that it doesn’t bother explaining why it matters.
That could just be pessimism on my part. After all, the episode does manage to tell a simple but effective little short story about Book bringing endangered species back to a place where they’ll be protected, and it’s entirely possible that the reason of the season will actually put in the time to answer the question this episode appears to be raising: what does the Federation mean in the future? And how can Michael and her friends help? I’m going to keep an open mind as best I can, and at least take comfort in the knowledge that we aren’t going to have to spend half of each review debating whether or not it matters if Discovery breaks continuity. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow! Mind that first step.
Stray observations
- I like the idea that it’s a big shock that Andorians and the Orions are working together. Who could have predicted?
- Maybe next week we’ll see how Discovery fares on its first few Michael-free days in the future? Hopefully the gang will get back together relatively quickly, at least.
- The event that destroyed most of the dilithium crystals was called “The Burn,” but I’m sure that won’t be important later.
- The big new future innovation, apart from the end of the Federation? Portable transporters. This seems like a very dumb idea, right down to the big fight sequence that has Book and Michael Nightcrawlering their way across the planet to escape pursuit. But hey, it’s handheld, so that means it’s cool.
- “All time travel technology was destroyed after the temporal wars.” Hey, that sounds like a pretty cool story, why don’t you do a show about that.
- “Hope is a powerful thing.” “Sometimes it’s the only thing.” Look, I know that sounds pretty, but I’m going to need a bit more than that, okay? Right now it’s a bumper sticker.
259 Comments
So what did everybody think of Lower Decks? I think it’s the best Trek since DS9 and the best first season of a Trek show since either TOS or ever. I’m deeply Internet Outraged that the AV Club didn’t cover it.
It’s clearly made by people with deep love and knowledge of the franchise, and I love that they hardly ever feel any need to explain the deep cuts. And it was amazing to finally get an update on the Exocomps.
Now if only we could get an update on if the Warp Speed Limit saved space travel…
They talk about the Exocomps?! Holy shit thats cool. Maybe they can bring back hologram Moriarty while their at it too lol. Can’t wait to dig into this show this week. Just renewed my CBS sub to watch season 3 of Discovery.
It was appointment TV for me- the humour is a perfect balance of mockery and love. The tongue-in-cheek shoutout to Archer and the Enterprise in the finale was the cherry on top.
A great example of that is the episode where Mariner creates a Trek movie on the holodeck. It began with the trumpet-forward score playing over credits on a starfield, featured full-on phaser disintegrations in a way the films only do and had the minute long ship flyby.It’s the tone of Galaxy Quest: We’re making fun of and honoring this niche thing you love at the same time.
i LOVED the “movie lighting” and lens flares and moving cameras. It was basically the into scene of the TNG crew in Generations. Everything is the same but… different. Also the “crew takes shuttle to see outside of upgraded ship” is always an excellent Trek trope.Speaking of Galaxy Quest- While watching the opening credits of Lower Decks… doesn’t it FEEL like the show-within-the-movie in Galaxy Quest? Maybe it’s that the names of the people in the Lower Decks—Tawny, Fred, Dawnn, Jack Quaid, Eugene Cordero— all seem like Galaxy Quest names and in fact some are the SAME names as the Galaxy Quest crew. Tawny Madison, Fred Kwan etc.
I also really liked it, also think it’s probably the best trek first season (helped by the low episode count), and am also annoyed at the avclub.BUT, after a full season I still really think Mariner is a problem. She’s Poochy. Or she’s Jake Peralta if the Brooklyn99 writers hadn’t realized that they needed to turn his volume down after the pilot.And giving her mommy issues is just…so bad. I don’t know who decided that all trek protagonists (since Archer) need to have unresolved issues with their parents, but they should have jettisoned that entire subplot.
I did grow to like Mariner as we got to see her realize that her behavior isn’t sustainable. The episode where her Academy bestie is already a captain was really great character work which was not something I was expecting from an animated Trek show (and really something missing from Discovery and Picard even though both those shows are pretending to be character pieces).My problem is with Boimler, who seems to be a character who resets each episode. He learns a lesson to lighten up and stop being an bootlicker but then the next episode he’s back at it. I hope they spend more time with him on the Titan and make him more well rounded.
Boimler’s tough, because he’s in a bullying relationship with Mariner. Paris could be a douchy bully to everyone, but Mariner is that x10. If lower decks were liveaction the Mariner/Boimler stuff would be seriously awkward.But one of the things that’s fun about Lower Decks is that in 10 episodes it’s done more character building than Voyager, Enterprise or Discovery ever managed for Kim, Mayweather, or the various Disco also-rans.
Man, they did Mayweather dirty. He had the coolest backstory as a kid who’s actually seen more than everyone else, and did nothing with it. By the end, the actor barely had any lines past “Aye, sir.” BTW, Enterprise was a great COVID rewatch
Yeah, I’ve been rewatching some Voyager recently and while Paris had some wildcard moments he was never really Mariner extreme.I think the characters I ended up liking the most in all of this were Worf-like Bajoran dude and cyborg guy and Orion girl (I feel kind of bad that I don’t remember their names right now, I didn’t even realize Orion girl was even Orion until they brought it up in the penultimate episode, surprisingly the green wasn’t a dead giveaway).
Well, I don’t think the Orions were ever really depicted to be in the Federation or the kind of people who wanted to join anyway. Hey skin is lighter green than they generally are, and it looks like they’re doing what Hulk artists would do off and on and gave her darker green hair to fit with her skin. Despite being an Orion in name only, you’d have made the connection if she had black or red hair
Mariner grated on me most of the first season. Especially as she was such of a perfect Mary Sue who always had the solution and knew everything, and her own flaw (she was demoted) was a big plus in her eyes. And even when the captain crossed a line to discipline her, it was the captain who ended up apologizing. But… they really nailed her psychology and issues. Especially in the penultimate episode. I’m sold that she could be how the brilliant child of a captain and admiral raised in Starfleet and exposed to alien worlds every other week might grow up.
I want to see what they do with her next and how they try to strike a balance with her rebellious streak and desire to do good.
i think that’s because EVERYONE has unresolved issues with their parents i’ve never met a human being that didn’tNEVER.
Mariner is all kinds of obnoxious, shouty and rude and in your face and arrogant.
The idea of a character like her is a good idea. But she should have been more like Chris Knight from “Real Genius” – the smartest one in the room, but without the need to remind you of that at every opportunity.
She can be anti-establishment and anti-bureaucracy, but she should be laid back and slyly sarcastic, not screaming at you.On a few occasions, she was so obnoxious her mother should have thrown her in the brig.
Yup. I just can’t avoid comparisons to Peralta, because even his character generally knows when to turn off his schtick.But they introduce Mariner by having her accidentally stab a coworker; she beaks off in front of everyone, everywhere, in every episode; and she’s secretly got nepotism going for her? It’s just a bafflingly backwards piece of writing, from a writers room that did a pretty good job otherwise.
The characterizations are pretty poorly conceived overall. The show could have been MUCH better at the outset and going forward if they were seriously tinkered with.
Why do we need both Rutherford and Tendi? They have virtually the same personality and comic gimmick – an extremely enthusiastic young officer to whom everything is amazing, all the time. And, at least half the time, the jokes for these characters simply don’t land.And Boimler even has a little bit of that, too.Mariner is a mess.The show needs to rethink its core ensemble.
I don’t know what the point of Rutherford’s mindwipe was, other than maybe as a joke about someone like Uhura getting mindwiped one week, and back to normal the next? I really don’t need to see 2 characters re-meet and re-become-friends next season so I assume/hope they’ll do something to mix it up.
They will instantly skip over the implications of Rutherford losing his memory.No, it couldn’t be a reference to Uhura. This is “Lower Decks.” If it was a reference to Uhura, the dialogue would have been,“Wow, so you lost your entire memory! Wow, just like Uhura that one time! She was badass! She was on the Enterprise, you know, with Kirk and Spock and McCoy and one time she got kidnapped by Khan and it was all, like, whaaaaaat?! Khan, what’s he doing here? But then Admiral Kirk came along and Khan went boom, but then Spock died and it was all sad, but then Spock came back to life and they met some whales and then he went to Romulus and Julian Bashir went to Romulus once and it was, like, oooooh, Section 31! You guys stink! And anyway, remember when everyone knew about Section 31, like, a hundred years ago and then suddenly everyone forgot and it was, like, oooh! mysterious! But, hey, it’s kinda like how you just forgot your memory, so it all works out okay!”
I’d say you should submit that spec, but they’d probably be intimidated that you’ve done more research than skimming some Wikipedia pages.
I have a wi-fi enabled cybernetic implant, but the only website it can connect to is Memory Alpha.
I’m presuming that Rutherford will be caught up on everything by the next season and that this was mainly a light gag.The real question is how is Boimler gonna be leaving the Titan.
no it doesnt. it’s great.
Another piece of thoughtful, in-depth analysis. Keep up the great work.
I’m not really getting a Peralta vibe off of Lower Decks because Peralta stopped being an asshole literally after the first episode. In the pilot, he’s being deliberately insubordinate to Holt and getting (rightfully) in trouble for it.The show quickly evolved and now Peralta and Holt have a very close relationship founded on mutual respect, they’re not out to get each other.But they still have wildly different personalities which is still fodder for ample comedy.Mariner would be Peralta who never learned a lesson. Who knows, maybe the events of the last couple episodes really will reframe the character and her relationships going forward. Here’s hoping.
your opinion is wrong. she’s awesome. fuck off with your expectations of how she should act.
Cool. Very insightful. Also, Mariner sucks.
The mommy issues is clearly there to give more dimension to Mariner’s relationship with the captain. If Mariner was just an insubordinate jackass, she’d be pretty awful (she already is often awful for this reason), so by framing it like, “my mom was always a hardass so I’m rebelling” gives extra context and a little bit of an “out” for her shittiness.Which isn’t to say I agree with the show’s decision to make Mariner such an ass most of the time. It’s a terrible read and the character could easily have been all the things the show wants her to be – smart, clever, anti-establishment, iconoclastic, etc. without making her such a pain.
Must say I enjoyed it a lot. I’d always wondered when a mock-real-life version would happen, and now thinking about it — OF COURSE it had to be an animation.I kinda get the diehards complaints in some ways but at the same time, people also whinge about “whiskey being whisky” and “Champagne should only come from Champagne”. It’s a goddamn funny cartoon and pretty good one at that, just calm down people! I think all things considered Lower Decks was a funny, awkward and justfully nerdy homage to the brand and the folks at Titmouse & co have done a great job bringing it to the screen.
I loved Lower Decks. Funny, clever, touching. Easily my favourite Trek show of the new lot.
It’s my favorite only because the others are so, so bad.
100% agree. Still, the gang’s way too busy doing episodes of anything Arrowverse related, the ST:D shitshow, and, I guess, Great British Bake Off (seriously, what?) to cover Lower Decks.
It was really good, and got much better as it went along. I liked it a lot.
I really enjoyed it. There was at least one moment each episode that had me in stitches, even when I wasn’t laughing out lout I was enjoying the jokes, and it stayed on the right side of laughing with Trek instead of at it.
Ha! I just said the same before I saw this comment. I’m not really a fan of adult animated shows, but Lower Decks is fantastic and has more heart than any other new Trek.
Zach reviewed the first 4 episodes pre air, gave it a C but said it has potential if the characters “calm down.” For me, I enjoyed the show. I hope there is a second season(if it hasn’t been renewed already).
Good news, Lower Decks followed the streaming show trend of getting a two season order from the start. It’s already in production.
“Good news”?
It has already been renewed.
yeah always been a fan of Zack but i thought that review was dumb as hell and way off base.it’s already been renewed, by the way. the second season is already written, according to the showrunner.
I’ve loved all Trek all my life until the newer movies and I’ve heard Lower Decks is mediocre and haven’t watched it. After this review I think I’m done with Discovery too. Too much disappointment in the world when I can just write my own Star Trek Adventures RPG scenarios and play those with my family along with watching the three quality series.
Actually, I liked the first episode of DISCOVERY Season 3 — it’s got some cool new tech, a Maine Coon who may or may not be more than just a Big Pussycat, a good-looking Man of Color rocking an Idris Elba as Han Solo vibe, an Orion baddie who looks like Green Kyle MacLachan, nice Andorran makeup (for once they doesn’t look like somebody put together an Alien Race based on what they could buy at The Party Store for under $20!), several angry Morns running like Quark yelled “LAST CALL!” while they were in the john, and if it wears its Starfleet-Loving Heart on its sleeve… It’s STAR TREK, what do you expect?
I’ve liked this show a lot more starting with Season 2, and Season 3 feels like it just might have enough Class TREK-ness to it to keep me hanging on for a while….
With the exception of the finale, was all flash no bang for me. Yes, lots of great references but not very funny or sharp IMO and didn’t do much to grow the Trek universe. Great finale, though, what they did with the Pakleds was great, slow transporters and all, and nice to see the Titan in action (as I’m not a STO player).
i liked it it was Rick and Morty without needing to think a bit light, with jarring shifts of ultra-violence…but it did not offend and Episode 10 was better than all of Picard
It fucking sucks.
Handlen would have hated it, anyways.I was thoroughly impressed by how well it balanced dramatic action and comedy. When the live action Star Trek TV shows tried to be comedic — with their slide whistle endings or Data doing stand up with Joe Piscapo— it was often cringy and deeply unfunny. It’s mostly been a show that takes itself very seriously. And then there was The Orville experiment—a show that tried to mix the Trek formula with a laughs-per-minute sitcom formula, but (like Star Trek) still succeeded the most when it wasn’t trying to be funny.Lower Decks was lough out loud hilarious without compromising anything in terms of dramatic story telling. Every episode had its A/B story, and neither was a dud, ever.
I feel like older Trek definitely had comedic highlights (most notably with The Trouble with Tribbles). And even if there weren’t that many comedic episode gems you could usually get a decent chuckle from a couple of the characters. I mean most of The Doctor’s bits are pretty good.
The last episode was the best Star Trek movie since Undiscovered Country, and they managed to pull that off in under 30 min.
Sooooo much better than Discovery. But since that is an insanely low bar I would say that it is my fourth favorite Trek show behind TOS, TAS, and TNG.
Really my only problem with Lower Decks is how rapid-fire the references are and how they come from a place of familiarity, like these characters grew up watching Star Trek and relate to them as people the way we related to the characters.
I find 90% of the references deeply annoying. I’m all down for a silly Q cameo, but why the fuck do they have to reference the Enterprise and its crew every 30 seconds. UGH.
Lower Decks reestablished that Riker was watching Archer/Enterprise. By extension, people in Star Trek probably watch lots of Star Trek. Maybe not so surprising they are so familiar with the classics.
All of them though, with fanboy-like knowledge and attention to detail?
Cool, let’s use one of the worst trek episodes of all time (Enterprise’s finale) to justify why the writer on Lower Decks is often insufferable.
The show was awful at the outset, but the last three episodes were quite good.I have a lot of issues with the show, but it feels like they’re on a solid trajectory now.I feel like Mariner was deeply annoying in the beginning. I also feel like Tendi and Rutherford are a terrible combination. They’re basically the same character, both young and eager and super enthusiastic, which is also partly Boimler. There’s nothing to play off of at all, no tension. They should seriously get rid of one of them and bring in someone else that offers a different shade/personality to the main four.
I could go on and on….but I was very happy with how the season wound up, so here’s hoping.
It’s the only new Trek show that I’m looking forward to going forward. They really turned it around.
They turned it around, but the show still has big issues baked into its DNA, so I remain only cautiously optimistic.
Lower Decks really surpised me. IMO, it’s easily the best Nu-Trek show.
It’s just best not to think of this as being the AV Club anymore.
I found myself pretty disappointed that the AV Club was not reviewing this, because there were many times when i wanted to comment to someone how funny the deep-cut Trek references were, but my wife was just not going to get the “Earth’s so boring! There’s nothing to do but hang out at vineyards and soul food restaurants!” gag. Or reference to “The TOS era” or “sexy people in rompers” or “Captain Jellicho.”Also, certainly i wasn’t the ONLY one to be proud/ashamed that I knew exactly what real-world year and place in the Star Trek timeline this show took place in based solely on hearing the first star date log entry, right?
Given that Picard’s family vineyard is not a big, public, or notable place that people would visit any more than my dad’s tomato garden in the backyard, why would they act like it’s all there is to see on Earth? It’s not even on the same continent as the creole (not soul food) restaurant which seats like, six people and they’re both uniquely run by people dedicated to tradition, everyone else just replicates food whenever they want. Earth is the capital of the United Federation of Planets and would have more to do yeah anywhere else
Uh, yeah I think that was the joke. Decades of Trek shows and we never see much of earth at all.(also, people DO visit vineyards quite a bit.)
I just did the math in my head. While Lower Decks has some major issues and gave us a wildy uneven season, it really IS the best Trek since DS9.Oof.
I’m deeply Internet Outraged that the AV Club didn’t cover it.
The list of shows we can all say that about has grown too goddamn long. And yesterday there’s an article proudly announcing that they’re covering the Masked Fucking Singer? For Chrissake.
I’ve been watching—-the first few eps were hilarious, the next couple, not so much. Although ‘out of phase’ Boimler had me in stiches.And that opening credits might be the funniest thing in Trek since Damar mocked Weyoun 7.
It wasn’t particularly great but I’ll be fair and admit there were a few decent episodes in there and there were some solid niche references to old Trek stuff. I guess just the biggest issue is that these more adult cartoon vibes don’t really fit in the world of Trek. I mean we’ve certainly had some crazy comedic characters in Trek like Quark and The Doctor but when the entire world is like that up to 11 it just feels weird.
i thought Lower Decks was lazy, but not horrid. My non-Trek-fan wife thought it was flat, and i agree, it’s all fan service, and nothing for non-fans.
I warmed to it after it calmed down a little bit. I loved the finale. Looking forward to another season of it.
The best Star Trek show since The Orville. I’d be joking but both were made by people who clearly loved Star Trek and the themes and concepts that made the shows so memorable.
I personally don’t give a flying rat’s ass if Discovery get’s cancelled or not, but I ADORED Lower Decks.
“we’ll all end up getting kicked off the ship and then we’ll have to live on Earth, where there’s nothing to do except drink wine and hang out at vineyards and soul food restaurants!”
Lower Decks was good and entertaining, except for the first episode which was meh. More, please.
It’s probably the most “Star Trek” out of all the current running shows. (Even with all the tongue in cheeks jokes at the franchise’s expense)It’s definitely the least stupid one from the writing perspective.
i *loved* Lower Decks. it felt like it was made exactly for me. Deep love of inside jokes with obscure Trek lore heavily weighted toward the TNG era, a fundamental optimism, and an episodic approach with only a sprinkling of serialization.
It started good, got better as the season progressed, and ended strong. My only complaint is the Mariner character, who I find the most unlikable character on this show (maybe any Trek show). I do not understand how she has any friends as she seems to enjoy interfering (and often destroying) the lives of everyone around her. The viewers’ introduction to her has her recklessly swing a bat’leth around and stab the other main character with it. Normally a character introduced this terribly in the first episode would grow and improve as the season went on, but she only got worse. The holodeck episode where she attacks recreations of her crew make her seem like a psychopath who would be at home ripping limbs off of bugs when she was a child. Her scenes are my least favorite part of any episode.
I just burned through it in the past two days. It’s great.
“All time travel technology was destroyed after the temporal wars.” Hey, that sounds like a pretty cool story, why don’t you do a show about that. They did. It was called Star Trek: Enterprise.
Beat me to it. I suppose a Scott Bakula appearance is too much to hope for.
Best you’ll get is Michael walking in on Tilly talking to herself asking, “Ziggy, why haven’t I leapt yet?”
I’ll take it.
I think they should do a series about those two beleaguered time cops from the “Deep Space Nine” tribbles episode who have to go around cleaning up the never ending temporal dumps of every Trek franchise.
It’s wild that the Federation has time travel police and that has never been explored more deeply than one gimmick episode of DS9. Maybe they got erased from existence because of some time travel.
There were a couple decent episodes of Voyager about them, too. Although those were Federation Time Travel Police from the future.
Also expanded upon greatly, across quite a few episodes in VOY.
Those guys were just investigators, they had no means of time travel of their own or ways to enforce the Rules of Time.And they were clearly in the episode to pad the runtime. Which is the biggest time infraction of them all!
The Department of Temporal Investigations appears in several tie-in novels and novellas, mostly written by Christopher Bennett. They’re pretty fun reads.
Their names were anagrams of Mulder & Scully, IIRC.
There’s an official tie-in book series about those temporal agents if you’re really interested.
Dulmer and Lucsly. There’s some novels about them that are not very good, but they exist.
I believe that was the joke!
Eh, not really. The “temporal cold war” ended up meaning “a bunch of Star Trek episodes that involve time travel with no real through-line”. They half-tried with recurring, un- or underdeveloped characters and so on, people like Silik and Daniels who had different motives every time they appeared and essentially no story of their own. But the wrap-up of the “temporal cold war” was at the beginning of the last season, and it was about… the plans of Nazi alien future Nosferatu villains… who were never mentioned before that wrap-up story. It had essentially nothing to do with anything but itself, but, uh, hey, Silik again!Otherwise it was like: “the Sphere Builders are from the future, so, yeah, we were doing a temporal cold war last season, right? So this is uh, part of that. Why not?” It never really meant anything, so anything could be “part” of it.
By its very nature you can’t “destroy” time travel technology once you have it. It’s always going to be there sometime, somewhere. You can’t really destroy any technology, cause you can just remake it, that’s why it’s technology. That’s why I’ve built an atomic bomb in my basement. All I need is a few pounds of fissionable material and I am set to go.
That’s the joke……
Let’s be fair to Zack, Enterprise was cancelled in 2005 and it’s been a long road to get from there to here.
It’s always ridiculous when statements like this are made.“Hey, we have time trav—-” “Shut up! Don’t let Starfleet know!”
Wait so Michael is refounding the Federation? Can someone get Sorbo under contract for a role here?
My thoughts exactly when I heard what they were thinking about doing with this season.
This was pretty much the only route they could have gone once they decided to go into the future, far or otherwise. If the Federation is still around, than the Discovery is an antiquated relic. Nothing the crew can do can contribute or solve any problems. Even if just 100 years in the future, let alone 800.
If the Federation isn’t around but went away peacefully (every advanced species transcended into guardian energy beings) then it’s basically a Star Trek show with nothing Star Trek. No familiar aliens or places, as every Andorian and Cardassian became a Q-lite. Even Voyager had the Borg.
At that point they might as well have the U.S.S. Discovery sent to Andromeda or another dimension.Which pretty much just leaves the idea of the fallen Federation. It’s the only card they can play.
Oh for sure. The loss of dilithium is interesting because Discovery might be one of only a few ships capable of warp travel (or spore travel or whatever). Its the time travel stuff being gone that I have a hard time with. Once that genie is out of the bottle I can’t imagine it being put back in.
It’s actually easier with time travel than other tech, since you can put the genie back in the bottle by going back and mucking with past experiments.In Trek, canonically, time travel was restricted by Time Agents operating out of the 31st century, a hundred years prior to Discovery. If only they had time travel, it’d be easy to stop use prior. Stop violations before they occur.
And any leftover time travel equipment (because each government would keep one) might have fallen into disrepair after a century or two.
It’s a little like nuclear warheads. Yeah, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle… but how much of America and Russia’s nuclear arsenal is actually viable anymore? The way things are going, in another fifty years and there might be no functional nukes left in either country.
They could of had the ship get drafted by the future federation’s time department. As a ship out of time/history and without too much knowledge of the future, they are considered the ideal expendable crew to hop through time and fix anomalies. The spore drive is a plus.The ship could be retrofitted with some new tech and the mcguffin they had to bring to the future could be removed from the equation via some technobabble.
Then they could have explored all the various trek eras at their leisure, even doing crossovers with the other trek shows.
Basically go full legends of tomorrow.
A tour through Trek’s timelines and multiple eras would be awesome. And expensive because of all the set and costume changes. But I don’t get the feeling this is the show the Discovery team wants to do, as that would really require knowledge of Trek lore and history. One of the reasons they’re going to the future is so they don’t get Trek-Checked as much and can play in their own sandbox.
“If the Federation is still around, than the Discovery is an antiquated relic. Nothing the crew can do can contribute or solve any problems. Even if just 100 years in the future, let alone 800.”So it would basically be like Scotty in Relics? And hey Fry managed to continue being a delivery boy after being frozen for 1000 years so anything’s possible.
Scotty in Relics was only 60 years out of his time.
That’s a mechanic from 1960 trying to fix a car a modern gas car: they might not understand everything and be confused by a lot, but some of the basic components work the same and your basic skills and know-how will suffice.
But even then, a battalion from the 1960s facing modern threats or even a minor dictator (or criminal cartel) would be hopelessly outmatched. The Discovery is 900 years in the future. That’s a mechanic from 1100 looking at a car. They wouldn’t have any idea how to start. And technology and weapons even a civilian has would far outmatch anything a military possesses. 900 years in the future (or 1200 for us) is a ridiculous long time. Nothing should be remotely familiar. At that point, people shouldn’t even look human as we know it.
Please let’s not work to reignite Sorbo’s career. He is bad enough with the insane Right Wing “conservative” crap he spouts, he doesn’t need the wider audience of an actual working actor.https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/14/kevin-sorbo-making-herculean-attempt-politics-it-may-not-be-alt-right-move-his-careerhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/how-hercules-kevin-sorbo-became-a-bizarre-lib-bashing-trump-troll
He was in Supergirl just a few seasons ago, though they killed him off. They’d already written Dean Cain out by then too.Shame really- I loved Hercules and Andromeda. Once social media came about and I saw that he’s looney toons it really made me sad.
Can we call everyone he costarred with and “forget” to call him too? Not counting the post-career nutjob stuff.
seriously, fuck that guy. And he was a shitty actor in the first place.
The Federation is still around, it is just fragmented and small. Less refounding and more glueing back together
Only if they’re fighting against evil atheists.
What are the odds that the Burn is tied to Burnham? Seems like something Discovery’s producers think would be subtle or a big shock but everyone sees coming.
I mean it’s tied to voyager’s storyline so that would be weird
I’ve developed almost as deep a contempt for Discovery’s producers (and by extension, the whole CBS Trek team) as they have for their audience. Their line of thinking on all things is, “Pan in, cue inspirational score, heavy-handed line reading….now CARE!!11!!!1!” I hate them so much. ST:Picard is only salvaged by Picard’s status in the the Trekverse and Sir Patrick’s ability to thread the needle in a way SMG cannot.Lower Decks works because it’s supposed to be irreverent and light. And since the whole CBS Trek team can’t shoot straight, it’s finding its way into the pocket most sane people would have believed Discovery should occupy.God, I hate them all. And the Section 31 thing hasn’t even aired yet!
Feel the Burnh.
I could totally see it being tied to her having the suit self destruct with it having somehow malfunctioned and went back in time right before it exploded and the shock wave of the explosion destroying the crystals.
god dammit. if the burn is really caused by the suit thing I am never watching Star Trek ever again.
Oh god Kurtzman would do this. please make him stop
Actually, due to more time travel shenanigans, the Burn is the result of a horde of rabid Bernie Bros being transported to the future and wiping out civilisation.
Well, Book does say “The Burn was the day the galaxy took a hard left turn.”
100%
I’m hoping it’s actually spelled “The Byrne” and we can blame it on John Byrne.
This premiere was … better than I expected. The less they tied it to traditional Trek, in fact, the more I enjoyed it, in fact. There were some cool designs and ideas (no Federation? Hmmm). And a spaced-out Burnham was much more tolerable than normal. But there’s something wrong when a guy I’ve seen for all of 10 minutes at the start of the THIRD season is my favorite character on this show: Mr. Sahil operated with a quiet dignity and a devotion to the Federation that felt very TNG. I wanted to see more of him, not less, and I like what he represents. I rewatched the two-part season two finale and godamighty did I get sick of the cutesy dialogue: “Would you like to join me in making Leland scream?” “Yum, yum.” I mean, the writers try really hard to make us think these folks are quick-witted, but it adds up to a bunch of gibberish. Between that and the extra-busy visuals, the dragged-out scenes trying to make us feel … something(?) and the poor sound mix (am I the only who has to watch every episode with the subtitles on to know what’s happening?) Discovery is neck and neck with Enterprise as my least favorite Trek series.
I’m hopeful Discovery can get better. This premiere was a decent start.
Maybe next week we’ll see how Discovery fares on its first few Michael-free days
Star Trek Discovery that isn’t about Michael???
The event that destroyed most of the dilithium crystals was called “The Burn,”
Ham it up.
Dilithium is efficient, but is it the only possible resource to allow warp travel? Zefram Cochrane built a warp drive in Montana, and there is no dilithium on Earth. I also feel like I could like Discovery more except for its break-neck pace, its predilection for pointless action scenes, and its heightened melodrama. All of which seem to have followed the ship a 1000 years into this Fallout future.
Technically there are other alternatives to dilithium, the most notable of which was the Romulans using artificial singularities to power the warp drives.“I also feel like I could like Discovery more except for its break-neck pace, its predilection for pointless action scenes, and its heightened melodrama.”What’s left to this show when you remove all that? Saru? I mean, I like Saru, and. .. umm….
I would watch the hell out of a show about Saru hanging out, eating blueberries, and reviewing science reports. Based on my description alone, that would be the best show I’ve seen in 20 years.
I get the impression that they’ve explored a lot of other alternatives, but when all the power sources for most of your infrastrucure goes “boom” one day, even if you’ve got backup ideas, you’re in for a real bad time. When the stuff that powers everything from starships to communication spontaneously explodes, it’s going to have far-reaching effects.
Saru was a great character until they literally removed his DEFINING AND ONLY INTERESTING CHARACTER TRAIT!
They had to Ret-con it in season 2 becuase to many Star Trek cry babies who like to complain about how stupid the show was, were pissing them selfs about how stupid it was.
So we’re in agreement that the show is stupid. Glad to hear it.
Dilithum doesn’t “Power” the Warp drive. The Warp Drive is powered by atter/Anti-matter reactions in the federation and other factions. The Romulans power source is small artifical blackholes, but again, they still require the Dilithium Martrix for the warp drive to work. Dilithium is a needed componet for Warp drive by all of the factions in the 24th Centry that are documented.
I mean technically Starfleet ships are powered by antimatter reactions, the dilithium is just what’s used to control that reaction.
But in the Kurtzman version of Star Trek those old rules don’t really apply anymore.
It doesn’t matter what the power source is. Ships can’t create stable warp fields because of the damage done to subspace.
yeah…it never made any senseit was just what The Great Bird laid down
It is not, but I belive with out Dilithium, at least in the 24th centry, your limited in your Warp Factor.
Three seasons in and this show still reeks of retooling desperation.
except it sounds like they’re rearranging the furniture and acting like its a remodel.
They literally ran out of ideas (terrible, terrible ideas) and had to do basically a soft reboot of the entire show.Not a great sign!
I mean that’s what you get when you take one writer’s concept for an anthology show, kick him off the project and then retool it with a bunch of other hacks, who are all so insecure about their comicbook-level writing, that they decided if they can’t do quality writing, they’ll do quantity writing. Everything in Discovery is always too much.
Exactly what I didn’t want to hear. Thanks for the straightforward headline Zack.
There was a show about the temporal wars it’s called enterprise!!! They have been talking about personalized transporters in Star Trek for forever….Do you even Star Trek???
side note I hate kinja so so so so soooo much
They literally say in the episode that the Federation isn’t entirely gone – Sahil even finds two Starfleet ships in sensor range when he looks for Discovery at the end of the episode.
I’m surprised to be saying this, but I think Lower Decks has more soul than any of the other new Trek series’.
Anyone else think it was supremely taking the piss for the city on Requiem to look so much like the Babylon 5 station?
No production of Star Trek has ever so much as been aware of the existence of Babylon 5, which is probably the funniest thing about the constant charge from its fans that Star Trek is its mutual rival.
DS9 (The best Trek series, although I have liked them all to a greater or lesser extent) did not get really good until it started aping Babylon 5.
DS9 … did not get really good until it started aping Babylon 5.
Ha! That’s exactly what they sound like! 🤣
Just because you are blind to it, does not mean it is not real. A lot of stuff involving the Dominion War was clearly influenced by B5. You want to live in denial, fine. It does not change reality.
Babylon 5 modern revival please. Way back when you said that B5 was one of the only two shows to really get sc-fi right on tv. Now there’s a third (The Expanse)…but man, how awesome would it be to get more stories in the B5 universe?
It’s absurd to me that we’re getting a new Battlestar Galactica reboot, while Babylon 5 just sits there.
Babylon 5 modern revival please.I think B5 shot itself in the foot by being too good (while also being super cheesy).Seasons 2-4 with the shadowwar and civilwar tell such a good story. I don’t know what other stories in that universe would compare.A tv show would want human main characters, but they can’t really do a prequel because all of that stuff is pretty well covered (and that’s probably for the best). And the alien races were great as part of a whole diplomatic tapestry, but a show about just the minbari or narn alone would be mind-numbing. And any later stuff with the Rangers smells too much like fantasy. It’s also all just inherently less interesting than the mix of totalitarianism & the First Ones that we already got.It sucks that the acting is wooden, the effects are iffy, and that it’s not in hd, but I really think they captured lighting in a bottle once. Any peak-tv reimagining would be much worse.
I want a BSG-style total reboot of B5. The original series did almost too good of a job of resolving itself, to the point that the various sequel attempts had less room to tell effective stories and suffered from it.
BSG is basically killer robots + some Mormon stuff, and the 70s version wasn’t very good, which left plenty of room for RDM to reinvent it post-9/11. Yet another reboot is stupid, but RDM’s version never really dealt with the AI side of things (until caprica), and it all fell apart at the end, so maybe there’s room for another take.For b5, I would say that the engine of the story is Diplomacy? I could be wrong, but that’s why I never would have cared about Crusade, or the Rangers. I don’t know how anyone reimagines the earth-minibar war (for example) without breaking all the stuff with Galen, and B4, and the traingle thingy…Or the teep war would be an obvious choice, except thst the teeps on their own just aren’t that interesting (ugh, Byron) without all of the other galactic intrigue.I dunno. JMS has said it will never happen because of rights issues. But if it did happen, it would be guaranteed to be a disappointment.
I think it would be better to simply retell the original story arcs without quite so much cheese. Like boom today, boom shaka laka never.
I strongly suspect that this season will continue its tradition of “creative borrowing,” this time from Andromeda. But hey, that was a Roddenberry creation so why not plager… I mean “creatively borrow” it.Also, they had portable transporters in the 24th century. Old news
Wasn’t Andromeda originally a Trek script that was retooled to de-Trekify it?
“Andromeda” wasn’t based on a Trek script. “Andromeda” was a retooling of notes from old Gene Roddenberry projects including “Genesis II” and, apparently, “Strange New World” (according to ye olde Wikipœdia). “Andromeda” came about because Majel Barrett-Roddenberry worked with studios on producing shows from Gene Roddenberry’s old notes, including what became “Earth: Final Conflict.”
so now Star Trek is Firefly? yeah….no.
So, calling it as I see it – the Spore Drive/DASH Drive is going to be really important this season. With little dilithium left in the universe, what’s left of the Federation will need a faster, and ultimately greener (ex. Not ripping holes in subspace at high warp) way of travel, and Discovery has just that. We’re probably going to see that the same rule that was laid out in the S2 finale – that no one can speak of Discovery or it’s Spore Drive – will be removed. The reason that the Federation wasn’t able to come back from The Burn was because its solution (Spore Drive tech) was under lock-and-key under threat of treason.
I’m going to keep an open mind as best I canGoing by your own mention that you already seem to not be into this season or episode because they didn’t give you the story of your preference, this really seems quite unlikely. Please, do prove me wrong though.
Him not liking the show doesn’t mean he doesn’t have an open mind.I approach many things with a “open mind” and still end up disliking them.
Zack has detested this series and all things new Trek since the recent CBS All Access launch. I don’t take him seriously.
That could be, and I’m just throwing this out there as a very very small possibility, because maybe the majority of the CBS All Access Trek shows haven’t been very good?
And yet they remain wildly successful! Crazy right
Not really. The Transformers movies aren’t very good and make a billion dollars. Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean people won’t watch it. You slap in a fair amount of familiarity, add music stings in the right place to tell people how they should be feeling, and enough nostalgia to coat over the cracks in your characters and story and you can make something people will watch.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Yeah you’re absolutely right. It’s the story, pacing, characters, and overall writing that make them bad. My liking or disliking something has no bearing on it. I like Death Wish 3. That doesn’t make it not a bad movie.
I mean, it’s very possible to critically evaluate an extremely successful thing and come to the conclusion that it isn’t very good. We don’t decide everything by majority vote.I don’t begrudge people their love of Discovery or Picard or Lower Decks or what have you at all – people often like things I don’t – but that doesn’t mean I think they’re good, nor that I couldn’t build a critical argument describing exactly why I think they’re bad.
You are correct to characterize your conjecture as “a very very small possibility”—to the extent “very very small” is a colloquial (albeit technically inaccurate) near-synonym for “nonexistent”—due to said conjecture’s explicit reliance on a false premise.
Keeping an open mind does not mean praising something that is a bad mess.
Negative reviewers can be perfectly reasonable, and long as they are actually watching the show and commenting on what actually happens in each episode.The reviewers that aren’t paying attention and just makes shit up, good or bad, can go fuck themselves.
Great season opener! Loved it. SMG is a really strong actor and she did fantastic with the material. I wonder if the burn is related to the Omega particle? Looking forward to getting the Disco gang back together and I enjoyed the world building so far.
“All time travel technology was destroyed after the temporal wars.” Hey,
that sounds like a pretty cool story, why don’t you do a show about that.Who wants to tell him? 😬
I get the feeling that you’re dug in on your feelings about this show. It’s a shame because the whole point of the series is to sell the idea that the Federation was Camalot.The one big change the show made in the middle of its first season (after creator Bryan Fuller’s influence faded completely) is that it decided it was going to be a lot more explicit about its belief in Starfleet and the Federation, almost as a response to the haters who charged that the show was darker and less utopian than its predecessors.I for one am past tired of the casual body counts and over-reliance on action setpieces, but that’s not really a Star Trek-specific problem, it’s a modern day science fiction problem (The Expanse, for one, is lousy with pointless firefights that are completly gratutous even in its “grittier” setting).I’m mostly immune to the melodrama in this show (especially when it’s handled poorly like the stuff with Saru’s home planet last year), and I have less than zero respect for military-style traditions, but that emotional scene with the newly commissioned acting comms officer finally getting to raise his flag actually got to me. It was a highly economical way to set the stage, and the stakes, for this new corner of the Star Trek universe.
Whaaaaaaat? Zack doesn’t care for a new episode of post-Enterprise Star Trek? I never would have guessed!
“All time travel technology was destroyed after the temporal wars.” Hey,
that sounds like a pretty cool story, why don’t you do a show about that.”
Ugh no. NO MORE TIME TRAVEL SHENANIGANS.
That line was basically in there to stop fan outrage that there was no Daniels and his Enterprise-J swooping around, or no Timefleet zipping about in the Aeon fixing history or fighting the Temporal Cold War or whatever. You know, those Enterprise seasons that never quite worked (“Oh, you want a show about the history of the early Federation? Cool. Here’s a show with time traveling bad guys instead”). Time travel writing in sci fi is all too often lazy and inconsistent.
[Looking at you, Moffat]
Despite hating both previous seasons, I decided to give this yet another try given they were basically wiping the slate clean and doing something new.Holy shit, why is this show SO BAD???It does you no good to suddenly say you’re 900 years in the future when the holographic interface used by the 32nd century characters is stylistically and functionally identical to the holograms used by the characters from the “distant past.” God, this show’s obsession with holograms is absurd. They look terrible. Just because you CAN easily show holograms doesn’t mean every fucking frame has to be jam packed with ugly-ass holograms. Give it a rest!Sonqua Martin Green remains an actress of very limited ability. Giving her goofy gas was a dreadful idea given her limitations.
Um, why the hell did Burnham explode her red angel space suit? What was the point of that?The futuristic marketplace was the most generic, uninspired, Sci-Fi 101 environment imaginable.The fact that most dilithium spontaneously “exploded” across the galaxy at the same time is the most Kurtzman-y idea in a long line of awful Kurtzman ideas. It’s as dumb as if suddenly everyone’s duracell batteries exploded at the same time for no reason, or everyone’s souvenir crystal geodes (since dilithium crystals are merely that – they’re just crystals, there’s nothing that’s remotely explosive about them.)
Ignoring the fact that, even in the 24th Century, not all species/governments rely on dilithium crystals as power sources. Let alone in 700 more years they couldn’t have found countless other alternatives? But suddenly the entire galaxy is brought to its knees by an unbelievably stupid, galaxy-wide happenstance. UUUUUGH.Even when the show almost gives us a really good scene, they drop the ball. The scene at the end with the sole Federation bureacrat was almost really nice…but instead of Burnham just saying, “hey, you’re an officer in your HEART!, she should have stood there and said, “raise your right hand” and given him the actual friggin’ oath (or equivalent) on the spot. That would have been a gorgeous, tear-jerker of a moment, but instead they completely fuck up the landing.And, even in the 31st Century, we still have lame-ass “pew pew” handheld weapons that miss their target from 10 feet away. As if nothing new or interesting or fresh would ever even enter the minds of the people behind this show.
So much wrong to unpack here. Dilithium crystals are not the power source. They are however, important to Warp travel. The federations power source is matter/anti-matter reactions as well as a few other groups. The romulans are diffrent in that they use the power generated from the gravity generated by tiny Blackholes.
She had to send the suit back because it was ancored to the spot she just came from, just like how her mother kept going back to her point in time when she was tring to manipulate the timeline to stop the AI. Also she needed to send the last singal for spock.
Soniqua Martin-Green is an amazing Actor. Not sure of your credetails to be judgemental about such things, but I don’t know what it is your watching if you think her range is limited. Have you seen “The Walking Dead”?
If you can come up with a hand held weapon that doesn’t go Pew Pew when firing at a ranged distance, you should be a Sci-Fi writer, cause I don’t even know any more. While it is sometimes funny to make fun of the Storm Trooper Effect to always have the bad guys have such bad aim, it would be a really short show if the main characters had gone out with a single head shot. I don’t think I have seen any show or Movie involving shoot-outs where the antagonists are able to kill the protagonists, let alone with a single well aimed shot. I mean, these are writing challanges that date back to westerns, through to Cop movies, and Even moderen Movies like John Wick. I guess the soloution would be to do the same thing to ranged weapons in the future as they did with a similure Writing device, time-travel. If you could do what every writer, writing a shoot-out, can’t do, you’d be one hell of a scren writer.Also another great magic writing trick: Imaging what the future would look like in the 23rd Centry. Ok, NOW without acctully having been living in that time period, Imagin what the future of that Future would like in 900 years with only a few years real time passing. You can do a realist transtion to 23rd to 24th from TOS to TNG because 20 years in real time has past. Again, if you could do better why not write about it instead of bitching.
Well, you totally misunderstood my post, so where do I begin unpacking. No shit the crystals aren’t the power source, that’s literally what I friggin’ said. You even agree with me that dilithium crystals aren’t the only way people have mega power in star trek, so the effect of everyone losing them would be quite localized and much smaller in scale than the show is suggesting.
Green sucks as an actress. My credentials are I’m a very astute observer and consumer of media. YMMV. If anyone could watch her “truth serum” scene and not cringe, well, then you’re a much more forgiving audience than I am.
She could have shut down her suit or changed the programming or done anything with it to salvage it. It was no longer anchored to anything, it was 900 years in the future. As it is, her actions look reckless and shortsighted.
The moment I’m hired on the show, I will dazzle them with coming up with far more interesting ideas then they’ve come up with so far. Considering they’re being paid millions of dollars and all they can do is HOLOGRAMS AND HAND LASERS, yeah, it’s pretty fucking lazy and unimaginative. Across the entire galaxy in 900 years, no one thought of a different kind of weapon than just a handheld blaster? Gimme a break.
I’d at least ATTEMPT to make 32nd Century tech look SLIGHTLY different than the same shitty Disco design & tech we’ve seen for two years. But that is clearly too much to ask, so we get more gee whiz holograms which were ugly and boring by Discovery’s second episode. If you weren’t told that the show was set in the distant future from the show’s prior timeline, you had no fucking clue. There’s absolutely zero difference in terms of aesthetics, technology, etc.Have fun!
I’d give Martin-Green the benefit of the doubt, since she can only be as good as the material and the direction she gets.
What annoys me about Discovery is that it won’t just give the cast space to inhabit the characters, or let them be.
While you make a good point, despite its many DEEP flaws, I actually like a few of the characters on Discovery. Stamets, Tilly, Jet Reno, Saru (before they ruined him) are compelling characters with solid performances behind them.Green is seriously weak. I thought she was just bad at playing the “steely-eyed badass” (which, sadly, takes up 99% of Burnham’s screentime), but as this week proves, she’s also terrible at being funny, as well. I feel awful for whoever was the second runner up for that role.
What I wonder is if she was Bryan Fuller’s choice for the role, and how he saw her and the part.
Perhaps there was a version of Michael Burnham that would have worked better. For the most part I’ve found Green to be adequate in a mostly terribly written part.
kill yourself
So having all the dilithium crystals which are key in warp drives for the matter antimatter conversion process suddenly explode without any warning at all would destroy and kill most of Starfleet. It would how ever not hurt the Romulans at all or the Borg or Species 8472 or possibly the Cardassians and the Dominion. The Federation how ever would be decimated in a matter of seconds especially if these explosions tore apart subspace for multiple lightyears in every direction. Subspace weapons are bad mkay….
1) It’s obviously unBEARABLY dumb that dilithium crystals would, suddenly and for no reason and across staggering galactic distances, all just simultaneously “explodes.” It’s the most nonsensical, childish, non-scientific idea imaginable.2) It’s further stupid to assume that, in 700 years, the UFP and the countless other races and governments in the galaxy, haven’t come up with alternate forms of energy in the ensuing centuries.
1) Agreed2) AgreedWho knows, maybe they will find some red matter and use it to ignite a black hole making a portal to the parallel universe with AI tentacle monsters where they can find some more dilithium.
– I wasn’t crazy about this episode for a number of reasons. But the dilithium crystals didn’t explode “for no reason.” One of the key storylines of the season is going to be trying to find out why it happened.
– There are things in Star Trek that seem to take place over vast distances all at once, or even everywhere in the galaxy instantaneously. When they Big Klingon War Signal was turned on, it seemed like every Klingon ship everywhere was instantly aware of it (and got there REALLY fast). Also Burnham’s Big Red Flares.
– I happen to think this is bad science fiction writing, not because it’s “impossible,” but because it overrides the restrictions that should be built into science fiction (even if that science fiction violates real-world physics as we know it). I’ve never even been clear how Star Trek’s long-distance communications is supposed to work, and the question of how long it takes to get from Place X to Place Y seems to have been very haphazard from the start. (TOS start.) But dilithium crystals exploding across the galaxy is not outside the (nearly non-existent) bounds of Star Trek – all you need is a war (or a whim) amongst the Q.
So much to unpack here. 1st: I dunno what LaurenceQ does for a living, but Zack Handler’s job, by definition IS to bitch about it…in writing…if any of it is substandard. And much of it is. So LaurenceQ isn’t alone. 2nd: I AM qualified to write about SMG’s acting. I teach it for a living. She is a good actor, true. She was often my favorite part of The Walking Dead. But here, she’s a part of the problem. Her choice to hit every line out of the emotionally deep end of the park is making the dialogue sound even less sincere. And THAT is really an accomplishment with this show. Everything she says is so weighed down with “MEANING,” that there’s little room for moment-to-moment truth. There’s no room for subtle honesty in her interactions with other characters. She’s TOO MUCH. Takes me out of the story every three minutes. She’s not the only one at fault (See: Stamets & Culber. See: Tilly!), and maybe it’s not strictly her doing. Maybe it’s a bit of direction from Up On High. But Anson Mount had no problem getting around it. Doug Jones had no issues. Everyone else? Playing tropes. And SMG’s trope seems to be Mount Rushmore. Also, I have no idea what you’re trying to say about guns.
“Soniqua Martin-Green is an amazing Actor. Not sure of your credetails to be judgemental about such things, but I don’t know what it is your watching if you think her range is limited. Have you seen “The Walking Dead”?”I will give credit where credit is due. To stand out as the most humourless, miserable and hopeless character in the most humourless, miserable and hopeless show on TV is quite an achievement!
I mean Kurtzman is profoundly interested in things like worldbuilding, so dilithium crystals can be anything he wants.
The problem with Discovery is that it’s made by people who love Star Trek, but have no clue what makes Star Trek work.
The problem with Discovery is that it’s made by people who love Star Trek, but have no clue what makes Star Trek work.This ep really felt like people mixing up Star Trek and Star Wars again.Although in disco’s defense, while it does have many problems Star Wars pastiche generally isn’t one of them. So when the rest of the crew shows up again maybe it will sortof figure itself out.
The way I see it Discovery suffers from writers whose influences are all a lot more shlocky than what Star Trek needs. So you get a show that just rushes from (emotional) climax to climax, without ever really developing anything of substance. If you’d ask the Discovery writers to do an episode like TNG’s The Drumhead they’d make it all about chasing down a terrorist trying to bomb the warpcore, and not about the moral slide of looking for a culprit.
They know that Star Trek should be optimistic and hopeful, but they can’t really grasp how to do that beyond just stating things like ‘hope is a powerful thing’.
Do they like Star Trek? I haven’t seen it on screen.
lol I mean disinterested.
but instead of Burnham just saying, “hey, you’re an officer in your HEART!, she should have stood there and said, “raise your right hand” and given him the actual friggin’ oath (or equivalent) on the spot
Oh good. I thought it was just me. Yes, an enormous missed opportunity. And then she says he’s ACTING communications officer. Like, JUST SWEAR HIM IN!
Seriously. “Acting”?? What a dick move. Oh, then also SHOW HIM HANGING UP HIS FLAG! Don’t cut to it already hung.
It’s like someone gave several million dollars of production money to fan fiction authors. Not Star Trek FF authors, but.I forgot how fucking stupid that Rocket Girl (shut up, Micky) suit was with its angel wings. Because, you know, symbolism is best when it’s rammed down you’re throat after you’ve been beaten in the face with it. So, Mary Sue Burnham barely brought a packed fucking lunch for her one-way trip into the unknown. Smart. Then again, the Mary Sue will kick in and she’ll be fine.“Book” (ooooooooooooooh, look, such a terse, short, edgy bad-boy-but-not-really name) is a low-rent, scratch-and-dent, non-union Han Solo, right? Cynical smuggler, busted ship, but of course Mary Sue wins him over by being…well, about as a wooden as George Washington’s teeth (which, to be fair, is keeping with her character). She makes a series of smug observations – though she’s too socially retarded to understand it as such.Oh, and “I’m not fighting you, you’re fighting me!” is just awful, but not nearly as awful as the terrible conceit of Book asking Burnham something and then immediately following it up with “Wait – I don’t wanna know”. It was boring the first time he said it; the following sixteen times he said didn’t make it any better. I guess the writers think it’s witty and smart. We get it: there’s shit you want to draw there viewers’ attention to it, but couldn’t think of a subtler way to do it.Oh, and lychees don’t fucking crack. Arseholes. Anyway, around about the time it because painful obvious Smuggler With A Heart Of Gold is obviously carry something like escaped slaves or refugees or some other humanitarian cargo (“Your cargo is temperature sensitive?”) I turned off and got distracted by Archer clips on Youtube.They’re obviously gonna fuck, or whatever passes for fucking in this show. Probably spend all night talking deeply and meaningfully about their vulnerabilities or something.
So did Michael’s adoptive parents show up from nowhere again solely to tell her how awesome she is? Because I love when that happens.
I won’t watch this until after the whole season has aired, and I can subscribe to CBS+ or whatever for a month, but Discovery and Picard (yes, Picard) are good enough shows that I want them to be better. I think the criticism that Discovery needs to slow down and take a breath now and again is spot on. This is a problem with a lot of television these days. It’s like the writers know that the viewers have a lot of options, so they just throw things at the audience all the time hoping that will keep them interested. But when you’ve got an entire season to go through, this just becomes exhausting after a while. When everything is cranked to eleven all the time, the “big” moments start to lose their punch.
Breaking Bad and BCS are literally the opposite of that. The more intense the situation, the slower and more detailed the action becomes.
KurtzTrek likes to throw in something like the Borg (or some other element they picked totally at random), then literally throw them out an airlock because the story was never about them in any way.
One is great television, maybe even the best television ever. The other barely qualifies as entertainment.
This show’s current premise seems so dumb now, especially after Picard and Lower Decks showed you can have nuance with grey areas in a utopian society like the Federation without completely destroying it.
Oh wow, they’ve given up on advertising this show haven’t they, had no idea it was coming back.
oh yay… more Michael Burnham. The most shoe-horned-into-a-franchise-lead-character-ever. Why should I care about this character or vision of ST? Because Spock’s her “brother” ? Because she’s got mommy issues? Picard had family issues in TNG as Did Riker w/his dad, then later his doppelganger, Worf, Sisko, and of course did Troi— geez Luxwana (the actual ST mama) was intense- but the writers never forced the melodrama, they never manipulated the viewer emotionally as the focus, while ignoring the conceptuality wrapped in the core sci-fi premise of the week framed in a procedural type presentation. I know the TV world is different now, viewing methods, story and production development has changed but, this show has irked me profoundly for it’s mishandling of the central themes of the franchise. Frankly, even though Lower Decks gets somethings right— it suffers from a similar problem, not letting the inquisitive professionalism and personality of the crew be the conduit for the viewer to experience the adventure. Why do the characters have to be so ham-fistedly handled, they make Shatner’s hammy acting have more charm by comparison.
So our hero just straight up murdered a bunch of space mall cops who were just doing their jobs. I mean I guess we’re supposed to think of them as space gangsters and that makes it alright, but I still think it’s a questionable choice for an episode that wants us to get all weepy over Michael’s commitments to the ideals of the Federation.
Eh. I was thinking that, but then I remembered how often the heroes just casually gunned people down in DS9. The one where Kira rescues that Bajoran war hero from prison, totally off her own back, O’Brien kills three or four Cardassians on his own without missing a beat.
Did you miss the part where the space mall cops were trying to kill Burnham?
The first two seasons were dumb but entertaining schlock, and this one will probably be the same. I like how the showrunners gave up on trying to connect the series to an existing cannon, so they threw the ship into the 32nd century and made everyone in the 23rd to forget it ever existed. More dumb schlock please. At least it’s not insultingly stupid like ST:Picard was.
It’s almost like when the show first started and the showrunners said there would be an explanation why previous canon had no mention of Discovery or these characters, they already knew that eventually the ship would travel into the future and all records of it would be erased.
Almost, but assuming they planned 2 seasons ahead is giving them too much credit.
Oh I don’t think they had it planned out when the show was created how/why Discovery would go into the future and all “present” references to it would be erased. But I feel confident that when the show was first created they had a note saying “Eventually the ship has to go far into the future and all references of it in history need to be erased. Why? TBD”.
Yeah, this makes sense.
Ugh, I really didn’t like this premiere. Its going with the cliched trope of ‘heroic character attempts to revive long-dead utopia’ and the entire hour was meandering all over the place. Seemed more like Star Wars than Trek.Hoping they get more focus as the season goes on.And this was coming from somebody who generally liked both S1 and S2.
Seemed more like Star Wars than Trek.Interesting you say that as I also thought that this had a way more Lord of the Rings visual and Battlestar Galactica mood/feel to it than Star Wars, but I totally see why you’d line it up with Star Wars, too.
And they found yet another way to make the entire show even more about Michael Burnham.
They did do a show about the temporal wars. ‘Twas called Star Trek Enterprise… Also, some smattering of episodes in Star Trek Voyager.
Trek is weird, because it’s all about infinite diversity in infinite combinations, while also being all about the military and colonialism.There’s a story to be told re-examining what exactly the federation and the prime directive mean, in a post-federation universe. But “I’m new here, and I don’t know anything about this place, but I don’t like it, and I’m going to make things how they used to be” is not filling me with confidence.I’m really hoping that the federation remnants that she meets will have a little bit more of a canticle for leibowitz to them. But I worry that we’re just going to get a bunch of people in clean suits, because suits are civilized I guess?Holding onto a flag (of all things) for 3 generations seems like the kind of blind obedience that Kirk, Picard & Sisko all would have called BS on. (Janeway, maybe not)
…and thinking about that a bit more, when I think of “The Federation” I think of the highly successful, post-scarcity, quasi-utopia of the 24th century.But Burnham isn’t fighting for that, because she doesn’t even know it exists. She’s fighting for whatever the Federation stands for a year after the klingon war, right after all that section 31 garbage, and a decade before Kirk was galivanting around the quadrant fighting proxy wars.I know these writers aren’t big thinkers, but “Let’s impose my form of government on the locals” is just not a great take.
Imagine someone being transported to our present moment and their first impulse is:“This world has fallen into sin. We must restore the Holy Roman Empire”
Exactly, although timing-wise it’s probably more like fighting to rebuild the spanish or portuguese empires. But also “This guy cosplaying as Columbus is a totally sane and reasonable hero, and is not at all a weirdo.”It’s such a lazy piece of writing, because when Burhnam is shocked that the Federation isn’t around anymore, that’s not her character talking. Burnham’s not stupid, and for her the federation had only been around 100 years. But the writers just need their big beat.
DS9 did this in an episode where a Bajoran was stuck in the wormhole for hundreds (?) of years and when he returned he wanted to return Bajor to a caste system.
I am definitely not a fan of STD, the list of the problems I have with it is almost everything about it, but at the top of that list is Sonequa Martin-Green. She is a terrible actress. She’s pleasant enough when she’s been on talk shows, but wow, she just plain sucks in STD. I would love to see the auditions for her character, from her and any other candidates. If she was the best, the others must have been epically bad.
This entire era of post-prestige television basically seems like a Michael Bay movie — lots of nice looking scenes but terrible storytelling — stretched out for months. Let’s just admit we’re all hate-watching this shit. Why the hell did AV Club give this episode a B? It’s a D at best.
I will freely admit it! But I will also admit that I did hope against hope that they could turn it around with a fresh take 1000 years in the future unburdened by canon. Instead of the premiere being titled “That Hope Is You”, it should have been “There Is No Hope”. All we got for a little under an hour was some Idris Solo mashup while at the same time ripping off a bit from Indiana Jones. Also, why is Michael Burnham suppressing tears 95% of the time? Wasn’t she supposed to have been trained by Vulcans? It’s all so maddeningly stupid.
Here is my recap/review: Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham. Also.. Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham Burnham and Burnham.
I have to give it to the creators, their show lives with Burnham and will die with Burnham.
p.s.
Really Zach Handlen? 2 full seasons of Disco and you hadn’t realized you were watching the “Michael Burnham show”?? How is this even possible?
I like Lower Decks. It’s hit or miss, but it hits more than it misses. I loved the bit where the people on Beta III went back to worshipping Landru.
Re Discovery: Maybe it’s just me, but all Star Trek shows (TOS, TNG, DS9, etc) are primarily character-driven. I can see Michael and Book being an engaging couple, but I think that for this show to succeed, it needs to dump the old crew entirely and bring in some new and highly charismatic characters. That green Orion guy, maybe? Or maybe they can borrow a hint from Westworld and bring in Aaron Paul?Also, I was looking forward to some kewl 1000 year in the future production design. Book’s ship gets a big thumbs up from me, but not much else. I’m hoping it gets better.
Things that canonically still exist in the 32nd century:* lychees
* sandwiches
* cats, and people calling their chonky cats queens
* nostalgia obsessed flea market patrons
* handkerchiefs
I was hoping that queen comment was literal, and she’s the ruler of a cat planet. Possibly on sabbatical.
This episode has a Morn (the Morn maybe?) bodyguard, 10/10. But seriously, i hope this season gets better but i’m guessing disco is what it is. A pretty show with pretty lights and too many emotions all the time. At least it’s no longer a prequel, so that should help those of us that never watched TOS and couldn’t care less for spock, pike and the gang.
Guys, isn’t it a LITTLE premature to talk about how dumb it is that the dilithium spontaneosly combusted around the galaxy? If that is still true at the end of the season, fine, but I have a feeling they will elaborate a LITTLE more on The Burn.I like the idea of a Federation reconstruction program as a setting for the season, it is a cool environment, even though I agree with Zach’s questioning on how this is established.My biggest problem with Discovery is it’s “EMO in Space” tone where everyone wears their emotions on their sleeves and things are constantly done for love or friendship. It is not inherently bad, but it is so tonally different from all otver Star Trek.For me, the defining line of Star Trek is when Dr Taylor says “Don’t tell me, you’re from outer space.” And Kirk replies:“No, I’m from Iowa. I only work in outer space.”All other Star Trek shows are about people working in outer space. Sometimes their work comes in conflict with their feelings, but they all try to have a professional attitude. Discovery is somehow all about people having intense feelings in outer space.
So, on your last point about showing the Temporal Wars – wasnt the Enterprise? Though I guess they could retcon Enterprise which….wouldnt be the worst idea.
Ignore. Meant as a reply elsewhere
Now…if only Book had been an alien instead…
So true about the inspiration porn. I want to like discovery, but all the sweeping orchestra music and tear-filled gazes reads “space soap opera” rather than “space opera” to my brain. I don’t like it when a show tries to force me to feel a certain way. Michael laments the loss of the Federation, but, yeah, what if the world is better off? Seems to me like it’s a lot more fun—a bit like Firefly or Tatooine, a Wild West kind of outer space. Also, she bonded mighty quick with Book, amirite? I mean, he betrays her, but then suddenly they’re buddy-buddy and he’s healing her wounds with his forest magic.
They DID do the temporal wars plot. It’s one of the seasonal arcs from Enterprise.
That was a cold war.
…they literally called it on Discovery the Temporal Cold Wars
On Enterprise it was called a temporal cold war. In this DISCO episode they called it the temporal wars.“Time travel has been outlawed ever since the Temporal Wars.”
It’s the same thing, dude. Paradise even confirmed this, and the years match.
If it was the same thing, then this episode’s script would have said “temporal cold war” instead of “temporal war”. It was referred to as a cold war in Enterprise multiple times. This was not a slip of the tongue – they are obviously different things.Also, in real world terms, a “cold war” is not the same as a “war”. Just ask the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
They literally said it was the same thing BTS.
I don’t buy it. In the episode they said “temporal wars”, not “temporal cold wars”. This show is made by people that pull tiny details out of previous series to put into Disco. If they had meant the the same thing from Enterprise (which was *always* called a cold war on that series, never just a regular war) they would have said “temporal cold war”.
Did anyone else notice a very Morn like character escaping from the water slug thing? Didn’t have a line either!
The only other Lurian in the universe! Hooray!
“B” sounds about right. It was a good enough premiere to keep me watching. Hopefully this doesn’t turn out to be like season 2, where the good episodes were mostly early in the season, and it went all downhill from there.
Well I thought it was an okay start, and I’m barely enough of a fan of the first two seasons to keep watching. I’m not exactly brimming with confidence for the rest of the season though. Hopefully they will surprise me.
– This episode did not impress me. It felt very much like throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks. Also, nobody ever seems to want to tell anybody what’s going on, even if they’re trying to trust each other or help each other.
– Burnham crash-lands on a planet and she’s WALKING DISTANCE from a major mercantile port? She and Book fight their way out of complex with a massive number of security guards, where they have stasis beams and Truth Gas? They can’t track us if we spend 30 seconds immersed in water? To me it just felt like one thing after another.
– But the odd note that really stuck with me was Burnham’s constant shock that things are so DIFFERENT. 900+ years into the future. How long has the Federation been around in Burnham’s original time? A couple of centuries at most, right? What’s her knowledge of human (and alien) history like that she assumes it just has to still be around in about a millennium? She seems to consider it more like a God-given religion than a society.
– “Andorians and Orions working together?!!?!?” Why would that be a surprise to anyone after 900 years? (Although Burnham doesn’t know it, the Federation and the Klingons will go from a shooting war to cooperation in about 50 years. And there’s nothing even unusual about that, really. Things change.)
The Federation has been around for most (?) of Burnham’s life. Aside from her life on Vulcan, it’s all she knows. It makes sense that she would think that the Federation would be a constant and continue hundreds of years into the future. “Andorians and Orions working together?!!?!?” I can’t remember the specifics but I think it’s been established in previous series that these 2 races hate each other. This would be similar to Burnham seeing Klingons and Romulans working together.
hey look the av club is still paying (i assume?) someone who doesn’t like (or watch?) star trek to review star trek shows!
I don’t mind that the Star Trek formula has changed – arguably only TOS and TNG were good following it, while DS9 was good doing something different – but it’s hard to figure out what Nu Trek actually is, or if we need a Nu Trek. The age is starting show and the mythology the franchise carries now feels more cumbersome than helpful.And Kurtzman is just not good. Picard and Discovery are very much the ceiling of what we can expect from him, quality-wise.
Get ready for a season cliffhanger that involves an ancient, war-hardened Gorn. That’s my takeaway.
I’m a simple man. There was a scene in the preview where Tilly meets Grudge, and I’m going to watch the season for that scene.
What was the reasoning, again, for not airing this on broadcast?
Assuming they want the CBS All Access subscribers. They’re fine with season 1 airing on regular CBS.
michael is the only character on the show i give a shit about, i dont mind it centering on her.
They actually did a full 3 seasons of Enterprise dealing with the Temporal Cold War and believe me, the episodes dealing with that were not the highlights of that show. But I’m in the midst of a rewatch of that series and it covers all the big points of that war and why, for some reason, a ship hundreds of years before it happens are the center of that squabble.
I guess the writers don’t know that dilithium isn’t fuel. Anti-matter is fuel. Dilithium is used to regulate the matter – anti-matter reaction. Dilithium crystals are like the control rods in a nuclear reactor. The control rods aren’t the fuel, they don’t generate any power. It’s the uranium and plutonium that’s the fuel. The control rods regulate the fission reaction to control the amount of heat generated to power the turbines.Destroying all the dilithium also wouldn’t stop warp travel. Anti-matter is only one way of generating power in Star Trek. The Federation also has fusion reactors. The Romulans use quantum singularities to power their ships.
Binge-rewatching the first 2 seasons in anticipation of S3 led me to the same realization: this show makes everything E.X.T.R.A. It’s not really noticeable week to week, but yeah, it’s all so self-grand. Michael, gurl, chill tf out once and a while. I’m worried she’s on the verge of dehydration from all of the dramatic crying she does. But that’s really my only complaint. And maybe cut back on the monologuing? People don’t speak in mini-speeches. That’s what makes me feel like they’re trying too hard. Sit back and relax!After watching the S3 premier, though, I’m super excited to see where this takes the story of Star Trek.Also, I FRAKKING LOVE Lower decks, cannot wait for Section 31 and Strange New Worlds, and would kill a baby angel to see the new Janeway-led show right now.