Star Trek: Discovery Discussion (SPOILERS HERE ONLY)

[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]

I am very, very angry about Culber.

I don't care how DSC tries to fix this — whether Mirror Culber joins the crew, or they go back in time, or Stamets falls in love with somebody else — I will never forget that Culber was killed in the first place. That they went there. Trek proclaimed that one of the main characters was an openly gay person in a committed sexual and romantic same-sex relationship, and then they kill the guy's partner.

That is not groundbreaking. That is the fucking Bury Your Gays trope. You don't get to have it both ways. You don't get to proclaim openness and inclusiveness and progressiveness and then kill off the gay character in Season 1.5. That is BULLSHIT.

[Wowbagger]

Culber was one of the only uncomplicatedly decent people on Discovery. His too-rare appearances were generally a point of light in a sea of darkness. He occasionally reminded me that the show I'm watching is, at least theoretically, a Star Trek program.

Now I've got Tilly and no one.

Dr. Culber's death would have been a disaster even if he'd been straight. (Which, of course, he wasn't, and which makes this move weirdly tone-deaf in the current environment.)

Who wouldn't?

On the one hand, Lorca's evil. I mean, this isn't even a question anymore: in "The Wolf Inside," he unhesitatingly orders Burnham to exterminate hundreds of innocent rebels in order to preserve his/Discovery's cover. He represents nearly everything wrong with Discovery.

On the other hand, I kinda like him anyway? Maybe it's just Jason Isaacs' panache. Maybe I just love strong-chinned white males. Maybe I have hope there's still a shred of Anakin left inside his Darth Vader exterior.

I dunno. My feelings on Lorca are oddly complicated and I'm not sure why.

Imma try to watch the show without bothering to consider it Trek, as evay suggests.

[evay]

My sweetie thinks the Lorca we know is from the Mirror Universe and came over during the event which destroyed his ship. That would be entertaining, at least.

If DSC had actually been the anthology/Wheel of Trek which Fuller originally wanted, I would have loved to see a half-season where MU characters cross into our universe, and we have to deal with them here. We always see it the other way around. We just watched TOS's "Mirror, Mirror" with kiddo so she would understand what the MU means on DSC, and Spock notes that it's much easier for civilized people to pretend to be barbarians than vice versa. So show us the vice versa. Show us a scheming, backstabbing, unscrupulous bastard who finds this weird, peaceful, helpful, collaborative society and has to work his/her way to the top without getting stopped.

[Insert gratuitous joke about current American politics here]

[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.