Author Topic: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****  (Read 45376 times)

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Offline The E

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
I see that. It could have a quite assymmetrical arc with the federation concluding that the enlightenment and diversity and so on are the path to go, while Cardassia plummeted into its opposite. There could be a sweet / sour feel about the whole thing.

Except that doesn't work, at all. The Federation started out as the enlightenment/diversity crowd; nothing in the war against Cardassia (which happened, ask O'Brien about it sometime) happened to change that stance. Similarly, the Cardassians weren't changed by their encounter with the Federation.

By contrast, DSC does have a story about the klingons to tell. In particular, it can show why the klingons we see in TOS are so different to the TNG and later klingons (and not just in terms of makeup). What we see in the pilot is a version of Kahless-worship that was only seen resurgent in TNG, a dedication to the principles of honor as laid down by the Unforgettable that the TOS klingons seem to lack completely. I think it likely that beating back T'Kuvma and his followers is pretty much the last gasp of klingon religiosity until it gets a bit of a resurgence during TNG.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Nothing is set in stone, especially things like the enlightenment values. It could be portrayed as a really big test of these said values for the Federation, are they really worth dying for? How much are you going to corrupt yourself in order to win a war, and how much will the Cardassians let themselves be corrupted by material necessities during the war as well?

Enough about it though! It was merely a small thought experiment, and I don't think you persuaded me it "wouldn't work". It's not even an issue, I think that the Klingons are interesting by themselves.

And, apparently, everyone hates Discovery. From anti-sjws to full blown feminists, like Anita Sarkeesian. Although, to be fair, I think both of those things were a given no matter what.

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
I suppose the question comes down to 'what do the normies think?'
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Offline The E

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
And, apparently, everyone hates Discovery. From anti-sjws to full blown feminists, like Anita Sarkeesian. Although, to be fair, I think both of those things were a given no matter what.

You really need to stop listening to the idiotic part of the internet.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Oh look Red Letter Media basically agrees with almost everything I've said. They are therefore clearly intelligent.


You really need to stop listening to the idiotic part of the internet.

Says the guy who retweeted my retweet showing that.
And hey, I did listen to what Sarkeesian had to say about it for the whole 30 minutes.

 
Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Says the guy who retweeted my retweet showing that.

I think we can all agree that you're both assholes for having Twitter accounts.  :P

 

Offline The E

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Says the guy who retweeted my retweet showing that.
And hey, I did listen to what Sarkeesian had to say about it for the whole 30 minutes.

And as we all know, what Sarkeesian and McIntosh say is always taken directly as canon for what feminists think, for she is our dark mother and correct by definition....

Except, of course, no she isn't.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Man, Orville on the other hand ****ing nailed it tonight. Very TOS
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DEUTERONOMY 22:11
Thou shalt not wear a garment of diverse sorts, [as] of woollen and linen together

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Everyone praised its 3rd episode. I found it absolutely stupid, like a fan fiction episode of TNG, badly written overall. It has some great concepts in it, but the execution was so bad. Like wtf are people drinking here. I will watch the next ones though, their characters are at least more "likable" (argh what a word).

Pay attention though because it is ****ing rare for me to say this, but Sarkeesian and her ebony friend (her words not mine!!) had some good comments on it (albeit in her usual dismissive style):


I think we can all agree that you're both assholes for having Twitter accounts.  :P

MOOOOOM HE CALLED ME A NAAAAME

 

Offline Det. Bullock

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Sincerely I mostly stopped listening to her ramblings quite a lot of time ago, she raises always some good points then she says something silly like women having no natural aggression or taking stuff out of context.
There are much better people doing the same thing without twisting stuff around and usually better at come to terms with problematic stuff without coming off as dismissive.
She and McIntosh either don't seem to grasp sfumatures or tend to dumb down stuff a bit too much and a thing a tweet by Lindsay Ellis made me notice is that they use a very dry exposition style for their video essays which undermines the purpose of accessibility I think.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2017, 04:15:04 pm by Det. Bullock »
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Offline Buckshee Rounds

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Does anyone else find war stories rather boring? It seems like every great revelation in a tv show or movie these days is omg war is happening or omg this could lead to war etc. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sources of conflict if they're written well and compelling, such as BSG, which I imagine a lot of HLPers would agree with (or the Expanse, which not all will agree with, but I much enjoy). Discovery's war story just doesn't strike me as all that compelling, at least from what we've seen so far.

When Burnham and Captain Georgio (sp?) had their first scene, then we see them on Shenzhou out near a weird-ass binary system with an unidentified alien ship....that **** was interesting. I thought we were in with a chance of seeing something new, something exotic and cool. Instead we got some bald Klingons. Fine. Maybe something interesting will happen next? T'Kuvma wants to unite the Klingon houses by warring on the Federation. Ok, that's better. They're fighting for something at least. What are Starfleet fighting for? Self-preservation? I understand that we'll probably see a lot more of the meat of this conflict as the series progresses. The first two episodes just didn't seem to spell out what Discovery is actually about or introduce any of the characters apart from Burnham and that science officer who ought to be XO.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend watching Prelude to Axanar if they haven't. It's a short fan film intended as a prologue of sorts to a longer film that sadly we'll probably never see due to CBS/Paramount squashing it in legal proceedings. I know this isn't the first time Axanar's been mentioned in this thread, but I think it's a much more compelling portrayal of war between the Federation and Klingons and much more dedicated to maintaining visual continuity with Prime Trek while seamlessly adding in some modern design cues.

In regards to visual style - as The E has said, Star Trek does undergo visual style transformations between series, sometimes drastically. The problem with Discovery's particular visual style, as I see it, is that it's just not as aesthetically pleasing imho. The bridge, transporter room, brig....they are all far too large. Shenzhou feels like a ship that's much larger than Picard's Enterprise D for instance. It looks like Mass Effect and not in a good way. The exterior shots are much better done, but everything inside the ship feels very much like generic sci-fi. It doesn't offer anything that's visually distinctive, like the coloured uniforms of TOS, the LCARS displays of TNG/VOY or the weird Cardassian architecture of DS9, which I think looks a bit ugly cos of all the brown, but it's still unmistakably DS9. Shenzhou and by extension Discovery, just looks bland.

And that there is my primary criticism - the show just feels rather bland. It's just another half-cocked, uninspiring war story that's somewhat poorly executed imho. Star Trek has done war stories before, but it's often done them well. DS9 was a bit drab and plodding at times, but it never skimped on the drama and characterisation. Enterprise had the two-parter "In a Mirror Darkly", set in the mirror 'verse, which was an absolute joy to watch. It was fun, it was evil, it had humour, it had sex....it was just bloody good.

Discovery's first two episodes were not completely trash, but they weren't all that good either. They were middling. They were mediocre, which to me is a far greater crime because there's nothing about it that stands out.

 

Offline rubixcube

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Says the guy who retweeted my retweet showing that.
And hey, I did listen to what Sarkeesian had to say about it for the whole 30 minutes.

And as we all know, what Sarkeesian and McIntosh say is always taken directly as canon for what feminists think, for she is our dark mother and correct by definition....

Except, of course, no she isn't.

Of course not, different feminists hold a wide range of opinions, but when so many prominent feminists say similar things, its hard not to see the movement as a problem
Stuff

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Yes, what this forum definitely needs is more ****ty discussions about feminism.

 
Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Does anyone else find war stories rather boring? It seems like every great revelation in a tv show or movie these days is omg war is happening or omg this could lead to war etc. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy sources of conflict if they're written well and compelling, such as BSG, which I imagine a lot of HLPers would agree with (or the Expanse, which not all will agree with, but I much enjoy). Discovery's war story just doesn't strike me as all that compelling, at least from what we've seen so far.

It's like film and TV sci-fi writers have forgotten that there's more ways to build narrative tension than just super-high stakes.  Lately it's always a war or a planet-killer or someone figured out how to burn down half the galaxy.  These aren't necessarily bad stories, but interstellar wars are practically cliché in sci-fi at this point, and even the well-executed sci-fi war stories are starting to feel tiresome.

My hope for Discovery is that the war between the Klingons and the Federation becomes a backdrop to stories with more personal stakes.  Develop the cast of characters that the audience becomes invested in and then put them in conflicts that affect them and their existence in a significant way.  Farscape, up until near the end of the series managed this.  The memorable conflicts and plotlines weren't the ones involving the Peacekeeper-Scarran War put the universe at risk, but the ones where Chriton was having his brain probed, or when Moya was giving birth while being hunted by Peacekeepers, and so on.

Writing good characters and character drama is hard, though.  Putting [shooty-shooty-pew-pew] into the script lets you outsource half the episode to the effects team, which might be expensive, but for the writer, it's easy.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
It's like film and TV sci-fi writers have forgotten that there's more ways to build narrative tension than just super-high stakes.  Lately it's always a war or a planet-killer or someone figured out how to burn down half the galaxy.  These aren't necessarily bad stories, but interstellar wars are practically cliché in sci-fi at this point, and even the well-executed sci-fi war stories are starting to feel tiresome.

My hope for Discovery is that the war between the Klingons and the Federation becomes a backdrop to stories with more personal stakes.  Develop the cast of characters that the audience becomes invested in and then put them in conflicts that affect them and their existence in a significant way.  Farscape, up until near the end of the series managed this.  The memorable conflicts and plotlines weren't the ones involving the Peacekeeper-Scarran War put the universe at risk, but the ones where Chriton was having his brain probed, or when Moya was giving birth while being hunted by Peacekeepers, and so on.

Writing good characters and character drama is hard, though.  Putting [shooty-shooty-pew-pew] into the script lets you outsource half the episode to the effects team, which might be expensive, but for the writer, it's easy.

Interstellar war is certainly a standby and was done a fair amount even in TOS. But I'd argue that TOS's absolute lack of budget (hell even WoK's lack of budget) made those types of story lines work. One of my all time favorite Star Trek episodes is Balance of Terror and it's hilariously cheap looking compared to Discovery's pilot. But comparing a war story where neither side knew what the other looked like to "remember the Klingons guys" is really not fair. Also the Romulans' motivation is BoT while not being the most original thing ever at least makes sense given their xenophobia and cloaking technology and their captain's decision making and position aren't as cliched as the Klingon martyr dude's backstory and motivation was.

Even if the whole guy being racist towards Spock because Vulcans and Romulans look alike is still less forced than "Imma mutiny cuz Sarek said Michelle Yeoh is being a dumbass". At this point I don't really care about Michael's character arc because of how stupid the mutiny was and even if she gets the same arc as racist man from BoT I'm assuming it'll be dragged out beyond reason.
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Offline Buckshee Rounds

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Agreed. TOS' lack of budget forced the makers to draw in the audience in other ways by having compelling storylines, quality dialogue, interesting characters etc. It was the same for the old Dr. Who. The Doctor was never this almighty superhero they make him out to be in NuWho, he was just this bumbling intellectual that went around causing half the problems he wound up solving, but the stories were of a much higher calibre and quality than they are today.

I watched the Red Letter Media review from above and something they touched on was the need for tv shows to draw in audiences by having these long, series-spanning storyline arcs. If you want a TNG-style one-off episode that is its' own thing and not tied to any overarching story then you're better off watching Black Mirror or similar shows. Which makes me wonder why Discovery can't do TNG-style one-off episodes if other shows are doing it and prospering because of it. Clearly audiences haven't given up on that kind of storytelling.

Why does every tv show have to be Game of Thrones now?!

 

Offline Damage

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
   One of my favorite bits of Star Trek stories comes not from the various series, not from the movies, and not even from the novels.  It started way back in the days of the tabletop Star Trek:  The Role Playing Game from FASA, and is called "The Four Years' War."  In short, it's a major conflict between the Klingon Empire and the Federation that involved thousands of ships and battles along the entire border.  It occured generally around the time of Discovery, and ended somewhere long before TOS, but the years are a difficult to nail down thanks to the idea that Stardates are somehow easy to translate.

  To make a long story short, one of my favorite parts was that *not every ship* in Starfleet was dedicated to this war.  There were still ships patrolling the borders, and there were still ships working on exploratory missions--though these were of course reduced due to the war effort.  The point is we don't necessarily need to fear that The Klingon War is going to be a major focus of this series.  Its very name "Discovery" implies that an interstellar conflict is in fact NOT its primary story to tell, though we're certainly going to get some bits and pieces all the time.

  That would fit with Burnham's immediate character arc, a ship in need of experienced crew and an officer with a troubled past being sent somewhere ELSE than the front lines.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
id should totally sue these idiots for stealing their ip. Jesus F Christ this episode.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
Ok, now this episode was entirely terrible, it was hogwash from beggining to end, but it reached a peak of utter nonsense when Michael started reciting Alice in Wonderland while being pursued by Pinky itself. Jon Romero must be so proud.

The captain is a villain, apparently.

There's a new kind of super-mega-insta-teleporter that is based on some wacky idea about how everything is linked by everything else, life, energy, the universe, whatever. So mega-inspired I felt I was watching a Deepak Chopra non-fiction documentary.

Saru is still the brightest spot in the show (kinda like the only Star Trekkian thing within the episode that keeps reminding me what the show could have been).

An entire ship being blown to bits for no good reason whatsoever.

But hey, I at least give thanks to the director for stopping that dutch angle craze.


 

Offline The E

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Re: Star Trek Discovery -- This is the good ****
I liked this episode a lot.

The theme of the show (which Deep Space Nine already explored to some extent) seems to be about moral compromises during wartime; Starfleet compromises its morals to deliver a win, Lorca is deeply, deeply compromised from the get-go as someone who apparently subscrides to an ends justifies the means philosophy, Burnham has compromised herself in the name of preventing a war. It's going to be interesting to see how this all shakes out (I am at this time accepting bets for Lorca's pet tribble ending up on a klingon world soon).
Sure, the instantaneous teleport by fungus is a problem, but I am interested to see what they find out about that tech that makes it unusable later on.

I am somewhat bemused by this assertion that the series is ruined because it introduced things that later shows don't use despite its obvious implications. I mean, Starfleet has access to time travel pretty much at will, and yet it is never really presented as a realistic solution for any problem they come across.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns