Paramount+ Star Trek: Discovery - Official Thread (2 Viewers)

[TJPC]

Does it occur to the makers of the new Trek that some of us now find Klingons tiresome? Enough of the Klingons already! Except for the two Duras sisters who for some reason I enjoyed, the rest have far outstayed their welcome. Aren’t there any other races in the Galaxy we could investigate?
They could audition some of them with questions like:

1) Do you have so many teeth that you are almost impossible to understand and must speak slowly and labouriously while we read sub-titles?

2) Is your culture based on a series of Viking cliches?

3) Do you continually perform tiresome rituals at the drop of a hat?

This is why K’Ehleyr (Warf’s half Klingon girlfriend) was so refreshing.

 

[Nelson Au]

I'll give them a little more rope. I'm not a fan of Alex Kurtzman. I have been wondering where his former writing partner, Roberto Orci is, I think he knows Star Trek, and especially the TNG era better of the two. Since he's not the show runner, his contributions to the series could be minimal.

If what we saw in Context is for Kings is what it appears to be, then this is a new way to look at a Star Trek series. I'm being vague in case I might be spoilering it for some people.

And potential spoilers for those who didn't see Context is for Kings: I saw an analysis of the series and it brought up some interesting points that I'd forgotten about. Burnham is not unique as Ensign Ro and Tom Paris were once criminals and a Starfleet officer saw potential in them for redemption.

 

[Johnny Angell]

Kurtzman on on the “new” Klingons;

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman said he wanted to address the Klingons, speaking for a long time. “At the heart of Star Trek is the idea that what we think of the other is a mirror to ourselves,” he started. The core of Kirtzman’s argument was that the Klingons will be shown in a multidimensional way and would not simply be othered or villains. It was important, he said, that “we represented both sides of the war in a way that is understandable and relatable.”


“We needed to know what it was like for them to go through this too,” he continued. “We wanted to shift everyone’s perspective of what the Klingons are because they’ve often been relegated to just being the bad guy.” He added that the show would show lots of Klingons, that “were all created around the central premise of what Klingons are.” But the goal was to “for lack of a better word, humanize them.” To explain what they want and why they want it. If they didn’t explore this, Kurtzman said, “This wouldn’t be Star Trek.”

I don't see how Kurtzman offered any insight beyond what we already have into the Klingon culture. We are presented with a Klingon fanatic as a leader who wants war, while the rest of the Klingon empire is apparently waiting for someone to stoke the fire. This is new?

I hope never to hear so much Klingon spoken again, in my lifetime.

 

[Greg.K]

Episode 4, we're back to having Klingons tediously bickering.

OTOH I enjoyed the gigantic tardigrade subplot and Burnham's attempts to figure it out.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

The CBS All Access app has literally no value to me outside of Star Trek Discovery -- which is presented in 2.0 audio only. (Fans watching the show on Canadian TV and on Netflix internationally have the option to listen at 5.1 -- it's not that the show wasn't made in surround sound, just that the dumb CBS app doesn't support it.)

-It only has two original shows, and only one of those (Discovery) has an appeal to me

-For anything where presentation is important, particularly modern shows, I wouldn't want to watch it on the app because it limits the audio to 2.0, even for shows that have 5.1 tracks. So it loses against physical copies and every other streaming service for non-exclusive shows.

-It doesn't appear to have complete seasons for older shows, or even the most current masters. I'm never going to watch TNG on CBS All Access when they only present selected episodes in the old SD versions in stereo, especially since I have the Blu-rays. I'm not going to watch their random selection of episodes of Voyager when I can watch the entire series on Netflix. And while it would have been a great idea to include complete runs of other popular CBS shows newly mastered in HD like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone, the service doesn't offer that. For more than what Netflix charges for a single month, CBS Access delivers far less.

So ok, Trek was good enough that I'll pay for a subscription when I get back from my vacation in three weeks. But the service doesn't offer me enough programming to justify keeping the subscription during the two month planned mid-season hiatus the show is taking starting in November. Without new Discovery episodes, there's literally no reason for me to open the app.

I can't imagine that I'll be alone in that.

Actually, let's do that poll now -- the show is going on hiatus after the Nov. 5th episode, and doesn't return until January 7th at the earliest (I'm a little wary after all the delays so far that this won't be an excuse for even more delays) - so that's literally two months that the show will be "off the air". How many of you will cancel your service after the November 5th episode and rejoin when episodes resume, and how many of you will pay for two additional months of the service during which there will be no new episodes?

I just wrote a thread on this why not all access as a home foe all seasons of Beverly hillbillies or petticoat junction? Where’s Mannix, or Rawhide or the fugitive, streets of San Francisco or Dan August ? Why not have this content here ?

 

[Nelson Au]

I was wondering if there was anyone left still watching.

That was an interesting take on the tardigrade, sort of like The Devil in the Dark in how Burnham saw past the surface and figured out how the drive works. Though I’m still not fully on board with this idea of how the spore drive works. It was cool how the Discovery goes into the spore drive mode. I had a feeling the saucer discs might do what they do, but I didn’t expect it to rotate in that way.

Lorca is a wildman. Definitely someone unlike any other Starfleet officer.

The new Klingon couple were interesting too, so i’ll Be curious how they get out of that predicament and regain their position as leader of the movement.

And no one is safe on this show. Too bad for Landry. I was surprised they couldn’t save her and actually killed her.

 

[Carabimero]

It took four episodes, but I'm all in. It's starting to feel like ST. After four episodes, I like it better than I liked TNG, VOY and ENT (after four episodes of each).

I wish the Klingons spoke English for my sake. There. I said it. It's really tedious listening and reading as they talk. Takes away from the pace of the episodes.

I just wrote a thread on this why not all access as a home foe all seasons of Beverly hillbillies or petticoat junction? Where’s Mannix, or Rawhide or the fugitive, streets of San Francisco or Dan August ? Why not have this content here ?

While there may be legal reasons some content is being withheld, I don't believe that explains the widespread stinginess of the service. If they're going to call it All Access, then that's what paying customers should have.

It makes my mouth water to think how great that subscription service could truly be if it lived up to its name.

 

[Dave Upton]

It took four episodes, but I'm all in. It's starting to feel like ST. After four episodes, I like it better than I liked TNG, VOY and ENT (after four episodes of each).

I wish the Klingons spoke English for my sake. There. I said it. It's really tedious listening and reading as they talk. Takes away from the pace of the episodes.


While there may be legal reasons some content is being withheld, I don't believe that explains the widespread stinginess of the service. If they're going to call it All Access, then that's what paying customers should have.

It makes my mouth water to think how great that subscription service could truly be if it lived up to its name.

My issues with the Klingons now is the way they speak their language. It's all slurred and so SLOW. If they had the actors speed up their speech by about 20% and maybe lighten up the dental hardware so they could do so clearly, i'd find the dialogue a lot less annoying. Am I the only one who feels like the Klingon dialogue drags on?

 

[Joseph Bolus]

Ok .... Just viewed the fourth episode and ...

STAR TREK IS BACK, BABY!!!

That was a FOUR STAR EPISODE! (And the Klingon scenes dragged it down from “Four Stars Plus”!)

I admit that I thought all the production delays — combined with Fuller leaving and the whole CBS-AA mess — spelt absolute doom for this series coming out of the gate.

I’m VERY HAPPY TO HAVE BEEN PROVEN TOTALLY WRONG!

LLAP!!!

 

[Hanson]

I absolutely love this show, it's easily my favorite new show. But yes, the Klingon scenes are interminable, and the subtitles stay on the screen forever as the Klingon is spit out, and then other times blink away before I finish reading them. Even worse, it's all one track and repetitive. All of the Klingon scenes could easily be boiled down to a minute, tops. I think they wanted to make the Klingons operatic aliens, but this is easily the weakest part of the show.

 

[Sam Favate]

If the third episode was one step forward from the pilot, the fourth episode was two steps back.

Maybe it was the focus on the klingons, who are terrible in this incarnation. There's no reason to have them speak klingon for such long stretches. We've seen plenty of episodes of Trek that took place on klingon ships, where they were supposedly speaking klingon, but spoke English for the sake of the audience. Maybe there's a big segment of real-life klingon-speaking fans who have been clamoring for this sort of thing, but I don't think so. Here's the biggest problem with the klingons and the sub-titles: The audience feels little to no emotional involvement in this part of the story, because it's so completely foreign. Also, the klingon makeup just plain sucks. It's inexcusable.

Or maybe it's that the plot of the episode is essentially the same as a Voyager episode (Equinox) where they're using an alien life form as fuel. I get that it's hard not to repeat yourself when you've got 700+ episodes under your belt, but if you want to make Star Trek, you have to.

Or maybe it's that they're going overboard on the special effects, which can be beautiful, but are so complicated here that many times I can't discern what I am looking at. The 3D display on the klingon ship was like this. Had no idea what it was supposed to be.

Or maybe it's that, being so familiar with the original series and The Cage, I just can't square this vision of that universe with those. It's incongruent.

 

[Nelson Au]

Sam, I'm a long time fan too as you probably know and cut my teeth on The Original Series. With that said, I really have no issue with the Klingons in this iteration. I'll accept them as I'm interested in seeing what the big picture is and what the producers have planned.

Regarding the Klingons speaking in Klingon, I would submit that the main point of these Klingons is they do not want to have anything to do with humans and don't want any contamination of their culture and ways from humans. So it makes sense they don't speak English and the producers probably wanted them to speak in Klingon to make that point. Of course I realize they could have done what they did in Hunt for Red October and start with Russian speaking characters with English subtitles and then zoom in on the characters and suddenly they speak English. There's no universal translator in place with these Klingons. And in Star Trek The Motion Picture, the Klingons are not speaking any English. They were onscreen for a very short time of course. As was the sequence on Vulcan with Spock and the Kolinahr masters.

 

[BobO'Link]

My friend decided to keep "All Access" for a month to catch up on another show so I still have access for a few more episodes.

Here are my thoughts on E4.

I've decided the constant score under everything is an attempt to make the show feel more "theatrical." I have to question if that's what the audience wants. I, for one, do not. In fact I find that one of the major annoyances with current theatrical releases. That this series employees a score under 99% of the dialog makes me feel like I'm being manipulated, and not in a good way. I still find it no different than use of a laugh track in a comedy series. Most of the time the score attempts to interject tension in a scene there is none. I don't even know what the ship actually sounds like due to the constant score getting in the way.

I liked that the annoying roommate was less. Less annoying and less screen time.

I do not like the jjverse style Klingons at all and find them speaking constantly in Klingonese extremely annoying. I have no problem watching foreign films in original language with subtitles but this just doesn't resonate true. And just who selected that font for the subtitles? It's far too large. They are also paced and presented poorly. Several times in E4 I found myself reading them differently than what was intended due to a sentence being broken improperly across 2 separate subtitle displays. That's bad enough when it's done with SDH/CC but for something that's fully scripted and intended to be on the screen for reading by everyone it's unconscionable! At least the speaking parts weren't done in such a stilted manner this episode and actually sounded somewhat natural.

I liked how Burnham figured out the drive workings but absolutely don't buy into them making use of another creature in such a fashion. I felt like the creature was hurt/hurting during the process. Plus, they had the map in front of them - on a display - with all the coordinates - they even commented on this. Why couldn't they just make a record of the coordinates and not have to use the creature again? At least Burnham seems to care.

I still don't care for Burnham, the character or actress playing the part.

I had more trouble with the stream last night than before. It hung during the last commercial on every break. Each time I had to refresh the page to get it to play again and this caused the entire break to play - again. At least it only hung during the first play through or I'd have likely given up. And at least the show played OK, although every commercial stuttered and delayed things while it buffered before playing making the breaks take 50% or more longer to fully play - only to hang and have to go through it all again.

It still doesn't feel like Star Trek to me. At all. It still feels like a rather generic SF program with Trek themes/aliens/tech grafted on.

 

[joshEH]

Continuing the strong streak in fine fashion.

Loved everything with Ripper. Very, very Dune, and I dig the hell out of that, and they're clearly hurting it by using it as a Guild Navigator of sorts, so that presents some legitimate moral quandaries to deal with.

Klingon Game of Thrones? Love it, and yup, they ate the shit out of Michelle Yeoh. Brutal.

Tilly continuing to be a ray of sunshine? The best.

And Discovery coming in for that dramatic save and disappearing like a gust of wind? Awesome.

I never expected to love the show as much as I have. Such a welcome surprise.

And yeah, we've had captains killed before. Just can't remember one being eaten by the Klingons. I wonder, if Fuller was still in charge, we might have actually seen it.

 

[Harry-N]

Good episode. Lorca has become a very interesting character, and the story is taking an interesting direction. I have no issue with Klingons, the way they look, the way they talk - each iteration of Klingons represent that production's attempt at representing them on screen. Since no-one's ever seen a real Klingon, who could say how they're supposed to look and talk!

I continue to have a great experience with CBS All Access on the Roku Streaming Stick. Pictures are rock-solid high definition and I've decided that routing the stereo sound to the two stereo speakers is the best option. I'd prefer 5.1 - but that can wait for an eventual Blu-ray set, hopefully.

The show appeared ("dropped?") at about 8:10 PM, so we were able to complete it by 9 and then switch to PBS for POLDARK. I wish they would simply time it to 8 PM rather than 8:30.

 

[Nelson Au]

Yeah, the Klingons eating Captain Georgiou's corpse was pretty gruesome. If Burnham finds out, I suspect she'll go nuts. Josh, I'm really liking this new series too. It's refreshing and different. It's really cool to be anticipating a new episode each week.

 

[SamT]

Saw episode 4. Every major character in this show is so unlikable. Did not expect that person to die.

 

[Carabimero]

I was even, for the first time, humming along with the main title theme last night. Not that I think it's great; I guess it just showed me that I'm on board.

 

[Brian Kidd]

I finished the fourth episode last night. I feel, like I notice a few of you feel, like I would be okay with the majority of the show were it not set during the time period when it is. Tweaks are fine, completely jettisoning bits of established canon for the sake of, "look what we can do now!" is lazy and shows contempt for what came before. If, by some miracle, they are able to make legitimate connections between what we see in Discovery and what we see in TOS during the course of this season, I'll swallow almost every bad thing I've said about the new show. However, I don't think they will, nor was that ever their intention.

Making the main character Spock's foster sister is lazy. It was lazy when they brought in a previously-unmentioned brother in ST:V. It completely undermines Spock's gradual acceptance of his, previously shameful, half-human heritage and his confusion concerning human behavior if he grew up around a human sister. I have no problem with Michael (why that name?!?) being raised on Vulcan, but have her raised by another family. Lazy.

Holographic communication and displays are awesome. Unless this show comes up with a reason why everyone in the universe suddenly decides that they are bad news and it's better to switch to screens, then they have no place. Changes like that need to be logical.

The change in Klingons... ugh. I just can't....

The characters are all unlikable. All of them. They can all die in the last episode and I won't shed a tear. The showrunners will have to work hard for me to change my opinion on that one.

I don't hate everything. There are traces of a good show in these four episodes. I love that they are finally spending money on a Trek show. Seeing an imperfect Federation thrown into a war with a culture they don't understand is interesting. Exploring what normally peaceful and intelligent people will do when faced with war is interesting. It is shot well.

Were it set a good amount of time after Voyager and facing an unestablished alien race, I'd actually be fine with most of the show. It isn't, however. It's set ten years before the series that created a passionate fanbase yet shows little regard for established continuity. It's a missed opportunity.

 

[Sam Favate]

In my experience, every time producers say "be patient, all will be explained," they're lying and the show turns out to be very unsatisfying.

Producer Promises ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Will Address “Apparent” Deviations From Canon

https://trekmovie.com/2017/10/09/pr...-will-address-apparent-deviations-from-canon/