Star Trek: Discovery Discussion (SPOILERS HERE ONLY)

[Flying Gremlin]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

Is the Admiral dead? Alive? Escaped? Still jailed?

They do answer that one. Discovery seems to follow the annoying tendency of modern storytelling structure of coming back to plot threads several episodes later - this one is addressed in "Into The Forest I Go".

I'd reveal more, but...

[Wowbagger]

Yeah, sorry, that post came across as raining on your parade. Not fair, because I really do like Stamets more every week, I did like Saru until this week (I am now undecided), and, honestly, I like Lorca. He's a bad guy who obviously deserves the harshest karmic punishment... but that's true of half the cast, and Jason Isaacs just has so darned much charisma that it seems to balance out nicely for me.

So there are good spots here, and I don't begrudge those who are enjoying themselves. I hated the haters back during Enterprise and now here I am, become the hater. I don't want to try to ruin it the way the ENT haters did back in the day.

(Oh, and I hasten to add as I always do that Sonequa Martin-Green is fantastic. Burnham is being destroyed by writers who are determined to get her Mary Sue Score over 100 points and who insist on making her the center of every episode, but Martin-Green just keeps doing the lines and making them convincing. That slight edge to her voice when she goes to Vulcan Mode is just great.)

[evay]

I really like Stamets. Once he got past Random Jerkass stage and moved to Interesting Fuckup stage, which includes moments of Jerkass, he became extremely appealing.

Honestly I like everybody. I like that they're huge messes. I like that Tilly is competent at her job and a total doofus personally. I like that Lorca is a charismatic paranoid obsessive. I like the human-Vulcan tension in Burnham. (The Burnham-Tyler romance seems slightly forced, but whatevs.)

And as far as continuity... I don't care. I absolutely do. not. care. I am a Trekkie and I can argue continuity and the combination of Kirk's safe and makeup-vs-virus with the best of Get-A-Lifers. I just don't care. It simply doesn't bother me enough to get in the way.

Maybe because the show is so obviously just not pretending to care? The show itself is having fun putting the past in a blender and rebooting and rejiggering and rewriting? I mean, really, really, would anyone want to see sets which looked like they were built out of styrofoam and cardboard because "this is pre-Kirk and that's how Kirk's ship looked"?

This is Trek by way of BSG2K dipping into the Abramsverse and coming out as its own thing. And that's fine. If I don't like it, my DVDs are right over there on the shelf. TOS streams on Amazon Prime, which is how we're watching it with my kid. There's just so much other bullshit in the world right now which requires me to expend my energy and gin up my outrage that I just don't have any to spare for worrying about this. Besides, after the utter character assassination of T'Pol over the course of ENT, and the complete hatchet job of The Abomination, there's pretty much nothing Trek can do which is going to tick me off any more. It's all been done. The sacred sehlats have been slaughtered.

That's me personally. If the uniforms and TECH really chafe your ass, you are welcome to be as annoyed as you like. I deny no one the right to nitpick and bitch.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by evay

Maybe because the show is so obviously just not pretending to care?

That's not it. Star Trek has spent quite a long time not even pretending to care about Star Trek continuity. That's sort of its default condition. Gene Roddenberry made it clear loudly and often that he didn't give a damn what somebody said in Episode 2x06 if it got in the way of a story he wanted to tell ten years later. Both TOS and TNG followed that convention, with Roddenberry going so far as explicitly decanonizing stuff (especially TAS) that got in his way. TMP retconned a TON of TOS stuff, particularly visually... and then, when Roddenberry got bumped out, Nick Meyer came in and retconned a whole bunch more! The movies from TWOK onward have a very different look and feel from TOS. But they just decided to not call attention to this, tell good stories, and move on.

VOY was a unique show in that it didn't only not care about the larger universe with which it co-existed, but didn't even care about its own continuity, as the endless recountings of VOY's shuttles and torpedoes and crew size made pretty clear. But they, too, just tried to tell good stories so nobody paid any attention to the continuity details. With middling success.

And ENT pretty clearly didn't care for most of its run. Berman & Braga rather infamously didn't know butt about TOS and it showed... for instance, in their Romulan episodes, which really only make sense if you pretend "Balance of Terror" never happened. The Abramsverse movies, which I embraced as best I could, probably cared about continuity more than most of their predecessors.

So I'm used to Trek not caring about its continuity. That's the order of things. The writer's inadvertently mess something up; some novel or forum post or fan consensus comes and cleans it up. How many explanations have been offered now for how Khan remembered Chekov in TWOK?

But Discovery doesn't just not care about continuity. It doesn't just inadvertently mess things up. Discovery puts forth active effort to break things. I try to turn off the continuity part of my brain, like I do with all the other series, but then Discovery throws it right back in my face. Over and over and over again. Say what you will about VOY's gradual erosion of the once-fearsome Q character into comic relief; they never went back to a major beloved recurring character from two previous series and the movie franchise and said, "Hey, this guy? He's actually a garbage person. And we're going to make an entire episode about his garbageness so you literally cannot stop thinking about how incompatible this is for a single minute of the entire episode. And his utterly immoral action is a betrayal of the core personality and relationships established for him in previous outings."

It's an escalation of hostility toward canon that could have been totally avoided with zero injury to the story they are trying to tell by just doing what every other series did and setting it in a more remote time period. But, no, Discovery wants to have its cake and eat it, too: they want all the benefits that come from being closely associated with pre-existing canon (ready-made stories and characters that viewers are pre-invested in, such as Sarek and Mudd and the Klingons) but with none of the costs that come from being closely associated with pre-existing canon (you have to be consistent!).

It's a self-contradiction at the heart of their show. And it's not fair to say, "Just let it go," because the show itself is making its connection to canon a central part of its premise. The writers made a very clear, deliberate, and unnecessary decision to force us to see "Journey to Babel" and "Mudd's Women" in a new light. If we don't consider what Discovery does to prior canon, we're not really watching the Star Trek Discovery -- a bold move by the writers, and a failed one (IMO).

No, I long for the days when Star Trek simply didn't care about its continuity. Discovery is so much worse than that.

I mean, really, really, would anyone want to see sets which looked like they were built out of styrofoam and cardboard because "this is pre-Kirk and that's how Kirk's ship looked"?

I would want to see sets which looked like "The Cage" sets because they were much more aesthetically pleasing than the mindlessly busy, gunmetal-BSG-holoscreen noise of the Discovery universe. Matt Jefferies did a better job designing the look and feel of Star Trek than the Discovery team. That they turned away from the original look for something inferior (and would be inferior regardless of date or canon-compliance) simply because it was old is a profound failure of creative and artistic judgment.

In short, I could live with an update of the visual design if the new design weren't uglier than a Gorn in heat.

Let Alex Kurtzman's name ring out forever as the great villain of Star Trek producers. Berman & Braga on their worst day had nothin' on this guy.

[Flying Gremlin]

How exactly is Mudd a betrayal of a con man only out for himself? He's immoral, he's self-serving, he's got recognizable facial hair. He forced the Enterprise to either accept his demands or be destroyed in "Mudd's Women" and looked like he had no problem with it (it was framed nicer). "I, Mudd" had him try to strand the Enterprise crew on the android planet. In "Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad" his main objective was to sell the ship to the Klingons.

I'll return to Sarek later, as I am late for work now.

[Wowbagger]

Originally Posted by Flying Gremlin

In "Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad" his main objective was to sell the ship to the Klingons.

He beamed Lorca into space and laughed as he asphyxiated.

He found one of the most sadistic methods for murder in the galaxy and used it casually on people who resisted him.

He was delighted to kill within the loop and we have every indication that he was delighted to kill outside it. Not threaten, not bargain, not leverage, not maroon, not even orchestrate something at a distance. Disco!Mudd enjoys looking the object of his hatred in the eye and watching it die in agony. Over and over and over again.

Harry Mudd was an immoral con-man who wants to make a buck. He makes his way scheming through the universe, but in the end he's too sentimental to kill even when it would be very, very convenient (as in "I, Mudd"). He is, basically, Quark -- if Quark didn't have the lobes for business.

Disco!Mudd's a psychopath.

I've caught up now with the finale, and appreciated the last episode for not kicking anyone's character in the teeth. ("Si Vis Pacem" didn't take any canon characters out to the woodshed, but really tore into Saru in a way that hardly seemed fair for Saru's first outing as main character. Or, should I say, Saru's first outing as official second fiddle to Burnham.) The finale ignored almost everything established about Lorca to date and cashed some checks it never wrote ("When I came aboard, you were a ship of scientists." Really? They were? Shame we never met them), but what was there was good and appropriately climactic and didn't try to make me feel Grim And Dark about Starfleet and its mission.

If the show stays on the course it set in "Into The Forest," it might just start growing on me at last.

[Flying Gremlin]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

He beamed Lorca into space and laughed as he asphyxiated.

Who wouldn't?







*crickets chirp*

[evay]

Originally Posted by Wowbagger

Say what you will about VOY's gradual erosion of the once-fearsome Q character into comic relief; they never went back to a major beloved recurring character from two previous series and the movie franchise and said, "Hey, this guy? He's actually a garbage person. And we're going to make an entire episode about his garbageness so you literally cannot stop thinking about how incompatible this is for a single minute of the entire episode. And his utterly immoral action is a betrayal of the core personality and relationships established for him in previous outings."

I absolutely hear you. You make a lot of good points.

So maybe it's that I, personally, don't care because I, personally, can't possibly connect these characters to the originals. Maybe it's that I, personally, am not bothering in the slightest to try to connect psychopathic murderer Disco!Mudd to con man goofball TOS Mudd. It's so obviously not him that it's beyond chalk and cheese, it's chalk and jazz. The whole business with Sarek and Spock over Burnham is just... ridiculous. It's not even laughable. It's not even fanfic. It's just another thing, over here. I'm not even bothering to think that it's related to TOS. Like I said above, it's BSG2K via JJAbrams, and some of the names happen to match up. It's Discovery, but I'm honestly, personally not putting Star Trek in front of it. I don't hold it to that standard. I don't have those expectations. I have no expectations for it at all. I'm not indifferent, precisely, but I'm not in the least invested.

Trek is a particular and special thing. This is not that thing. It's a good thing in its own, different way. But it's not a Trek thing.

[voyager0929]

Originally Posted by evay

I really like Stamets. Once he got past Random Jerkass stage and moved to Interesting Fuckup stage, which includes moments of Jerkass, he became extremely appealing.

Honestly I like everybody. I like that they're huge messes. I like that Tilly is competent at her job and a total doofus personally. I like that Lorca is a charismatic paranoid obsessive. I like the human-Vulcan tension in Burnham. (The Burnham-Tyler romance seems slightly forced, but whatevs.)

And as far as continuity... I don't care. I absolutely do. not. care. I am a Trekkie and I can argue continuity and the combination of Kirk's safe and makeup-vs-virus with the best of Get-A-Lifers. I just don't care. It simply doesn't bother me enough to get in the way.

Maybe because the show is so obviously just not pretending to care? The show itself is having fun putting the past in a blender and rebooting and rejiggering and rewriting? I mean, really, really, would anyone want to see sets which looked like they were built out of styrofoam and cardboard because "this is pre-Kirk and that's how Kirk's ship looked"?

This is Trek by way of BSG2K dipping into the Abramsverse and coming out as its own thing. And that's fine. If I don't like it, my DVDs are right over there on the shelf. TOS streams on Amazon Prime, which is how we're watching it with my kid. There's just so much other bullshit in the world right now which requires me to expend my energy and gin up my outrage that I just don't have any to spare for worrying about this. Besides, after the utter character assassination of T'Pol over the course of ENT, and the complete hatchet job of The Abomination, there's pretty much nothing Trek can do which is going to tick me off any more. It's all been done. The sacred sehlats have been slaughtered.

That's me personally. If the uniforms and TECH really chafe your ass, you are welcome to be as annoyed as you like. I deny no one the right to nitpick and bitch.

What makes you say Voyager didn't care about continuity at all?? I think they mostly did and yes had a few flubs that could be interpreted as :violating but maybe nkt..thevshuttles forbexample.the crew did trade parts and failry kfteb and theyvHad REPKICATORS for Pete's sake abd acquired Borg tech with Seven that probably enhanced their regeneratove abilities and probably helped replicate parts..isn't that enough to justify the number pf shuttles?

[evay]

Originally Posted by voyager0929

What makes you say Voyager didn't care about continuity at all??

I... didn't say that? My comment was that I don't care if Discovery, the show, does stuff which "violates continuity" in the seasons before the time jump. I don't care that Disco's tech is obviously way better than TOS. We know TOS was filmed in the late 1960s. Who cares? The show is enjoyable.

There are gatekeepers who complain about this bit contradicting that earlier bit, and my point is that I don't care about trying to keep it all in line.

Originally Posted by Flying Gremlin

made me focus more on the rest of the bridge crew. I still can't name them all which is a problem in and of itself

OH THANK THE GODS IT'S NOT JUST ME. I thought I was just being stupid that I honestly cannot remember all the folks standing in the back when I could name and discuss all the bridge crew in all the other shows.