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Paramount+ Star Trek: Discovery - Official Thread (1 Viewer)

Jason_V

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Adam Lenhardt

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First ever non-binary character? I guess I imagined that TNG episode where Riker fell in love with a non-binary person.
I'm guessing that they mean in a social/cultural sense, rather than a science fiction sense. Trans or non-binary in species that overwhelmingly identifies as male or female as assigned at birth. Not a species that doesn't have the same understanding of biological sex and gender roles that we do.
 

Josh Dial

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Here's the new Season 3 trailer for those of us in Canada (or otherwise unable to view Adam's link due to region restrictions):

 

Greg.K

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Have to say this is the first season I'm really looking forward to. It was a good idea for them to jump to the far future, where they don't have to worry about any continuity issues.
 

Yee-Ming

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Annoying. Neither trailer link above works for me (in Singapore).

In this modern day and age, what is with geographic/regional locks anyway? OK, maybe for the actual content I can still sort-of understand, archaic as the practice seems to me, but for a trailer that is free to view anyway?? Makes no sense.
 

Sam Favate

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I've started rewatching Discovery from season 1 before the new season premieres. I'm up to episode 3. It was impressive from the start, but it had its share of big problems. For one, I still hate - I mean, really really despise - the look of the klingons. They look like goblins and their appearance goes against 40 years of movies and TV shows. Second, the event the show is premised upon - Burnham committing mutiny - is implausible. The part of her relationship with Georgiou that we see in the first episode makes her betrayal extremely unlikely. Also, Burnham was a prisoner in episode 3. There is no way she comes back into Starfleet's graces (why does her prison jumpsuit have a Starfleet emblem?). It seems that in their efforts to be dramatic, the writers went too far, creating a circumstance that doesn't work, based on everything we know about Star Trek.
 

Philip Verdieck

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Emotionally, I struggled at times because I think of Star Trek Discovery as being "future" Trek. Intellectually, I know it's "past tense" Trek set before TOS. But everything about it screams that it's later than Voyager, and I'm repeatedly confused about the timeline when it forces me to confront that it's actually pre-TOS. I kept thinking it was an alternate timeline, a shard of the fracture from the 2009 Star Trek movie in the future. Except it's not, it's all "canonical", primary timeline, pre-TOS. And that breaks my brain.

I didn't want to admit this in Season 1. But after watching The Mandalorian, it's harder to take Star Trek's inability to comport new shows with old style. Seeing Discovery on screen with Enterprise is very weird; they're from completely different timelines.

It sounds like you need to come to an obvious realization.

Noone in there right mind is going to attempt a ST series or movie with (limited) old style special effects. You are never going to get something that is pre-TOS to look retro. It would be considered too dull. That also pertains to the overall look and feel, since they can't see a need for that aspect of continuity.
 

Sam Favate

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Noone in there right mind is going to attempt a ST series or movie with (limited) old style special effects. You are never going to get something that is pre-TOS to look retro. It would be considered too dull. That also pertains to the overall look and feel, since they can't see a need for that aspect of continuity.

I guess that's the problem with having a future aesthetic (Star Trek) vs. a lived-in aesthetic (Star Wars). You can make the Mandalorian with sets (virtual or otherwise) that look like they came out of 1977, but if you did that for Star Trek, and made Discovery's or Enterprise's sets look like TOS, people would think it looked antiquated. Which is too bad, because TOS had some incredible design aesthetics, and the fan series (Star Trek Continues, among others) have recreated these with modern visual effects very effectively. I do think Discovery should have tried to find some kind of middle ground that adhered to the design of TOS but fit modern times.
 

Sam Favate

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I've been rewatching Discovery in advance of season 3. I just finished the first season, and I like it better seeing the episodes day by day (instead of week by week) but that season had a lot of problems. The most egregious of which is the Klingons. They don't look anything like any Klingons we have seen before. I get it: different races, blah blah blah. I don't care. They're terrible. Their heads look like deformed footballs, and they have four nostrils and look like goblins. (Gene Roddenberry would have asked "Why do aliens have to look evil?" -- a question I'd also ask of Idris Elba's character in ST Beyond.)

The moment the show is premised upon - Burnham's betrayal of her captain - is implausible. We're introduced to Burnham and Georgiou's characters and relationship from the first scene, and it makes no sense that Burnham would betray her. Also, if I play along with the whole thing, it also makes no sense that Starfleet would in any way allow her to be part of a crew in any fashion. (I know Lorca wasn't a real Starfleet captain, but still.) Again, implausible. (And why does her prison jumpsuit have a Starfleet emblem? Her traveling companions' suits do not.)

We never really meet or get to know the bridge crew. It was only last night that I found out Detmer's name. I shouldn't have to go to IMDb to learn who's who. Even The Original Series, which mostly focused on Kirk, Spock and McCoy, let us get to know the bridge crew. Who didn't know Sulu, Chekov, Uhura and Scotty? After two seasons and rewatching one, I still have no idea who's who. I know the faces, but not the names or any characteristics.

The turning of Lorca to a mirror universe character is very abrupt. He's a good captain that we see through most of the season. Maybe a little gruff, but he seems typically Starfleet. It seems they made him the bad guy to have a twist at the end of the season, which is the kind of writing ("let's shock the audience!") I hate. Also, more mirror universe? Haven't we spent enough time there already? Thank goodness TNG and Voyager never went there. I get that fascist empires provide more conflict, but that's not Star Trek's focus. Let's hope that if and when Georgiou gets her own show, we stay in "our" universe.

The show moves at too brisk a pace. We seem to know where Burnham is at every minute. There's never any time in between. In every other show, the characters have lives that we don't see, or that are hinted at (Picard likes film noir holodeck adventures, Riker plays jazz, Sisko likes baseball, Dax likes gambling in Quarks, etc.). The relentless focus on Burnham is a bit exhausting (I'm glad this lightens up some in the second season).

Tyler is a missed opportunity. I never liked his origin - that he's some kind of Klingon science experiment with Voq's mind (and shaved down bones? I'm not clear) and Tyler's mind occupying the same space. He never gets to be the mole the Klingons want him to be. And late in the season when L'Rell "releases" Voq from Tyler's mind, we essentially have the same actor as a new character we haven't met before. That's never satisfying for the audience.

With the superior technology on display in the show (holographic phone calls, 3D projection screens, spore drive, etc.), they should have just set it after Voyager. They make no effort to make the show fit into the time period they set.

The last thing I will say is that except for Tilly (who is a great character), the show doesn't have any levity. It's pretty grim most of the time, and that's also not what we tune into Star Trek for. Even the most dire situations in TNG or DS9 weren't this harsh. The show needs to lighten up, and it does (some) in the second season, which I am looking forward to starting. (I interrupted my rewatch of DS9 to do Discovery before the new season.)
 

Josh Steinberg

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I think structurally one of the biggest hurdles for Discovery is that Bryan Fuller conceived its as a one-and-done story. His idea was to revive Star Trek as an anthology show like American Horror Story it True Detective where each season told a unique, self contained story. So with Discovery, the plan probably would have had the ship perishing at the end of the season in such a way that Starfleet never mentioned it again, thus solving any canon issues with “why have we never heard of this before?” The idea of revisiting the TNG era came out of that too - that would have been a stand-alone season. Nick Meyer was working on a Khan story that would have been its own season. But CBS ultimately wanted to have a bunch of different shows, rather than a totally different Trek every year. So instead we have a Picard show, instead of just a season. But Discovery wasn’t initially built for that and I think the pivot from single season to ongoing left some clunky storytelling choices built in.
 

Josh Dial

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At least on this forum it seems I'm mostly alone in my high regard of DISCO (which is fine--nothing new).

In my opinion too many people view the previous shows with (extremely) rose-coloured glasses. Too swift to condemn DISCO for faults that were built into the franchise from the start. Too willing to level a critical eye at DISCO that absolutely never would have been directed at TNG or DS9 (and, indeed, never was).

Since Adam is currently watching DS9 for effectively the first time, I'll spoiler an example from DS9's "Let He Who is Without Sin" (a truly terrible episode):

In "Let He Who is Without Sin" Worf personally sabotages Risa's weather control system. He should have been court marshalled for this. It's completely and utterly ignored in-show. It was never criticized back in 1996-- certainly not on any newsgroups or boards that I was on. The most I can recall is a bunch of the staff saying they would have liked another shot at it, and Nana Visitor and Alexander Siddig having some production issues because of the timing of Visitor giving birth to their son.

If this was the plot for a DISCO episode the streets would have run red with blood.
 

Sam Favate

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At least on this forum it seems I'm mostly alone in my high regard of DISCO (which is fine--nothing new).

To be fair, I do have a high regard for Discovery's second season. I will be revisiting that in the next two weeks, so I will post some of my thoughts. But when it aired, I loved it.
 

joshEH

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Shooting on DSC Season Four has officially begun:


Hopefully Picard season two can also finally get off the ground soon, as well. Though given Stewart's age, I can see why they'd maybe want to ensure that circumstances are as safe as they can possibly be, considering.

The turning of Lorca to a mirror universe character is very abrupt. He's a good captain that we see through most of the season. Maybe a little gruff, but he seems typically Starfleet. It seems they made him the bad guy to have a twist at the end of the season, which is the kind of writing ("let's shock the audience!") I hate.
To this particular point, it should be noted that all the clues were there giving away Lorca's secret identity right from his very first episode -- things like Cornwell's postcoital discovery (pardon pun) of Lorca's chest-scars (revealed to be caused by Mirror Universe agonizers) to him eating "calamari" in his quarters while speaking with Burnham (in actuality Kelpien, complete with dippin' sauce), etc.

His so-called "good captain"-persona was simply that -- a persona, a put-on, a disguise. He'd finally had enough of the Prime Universe by the time of the battle with the Klingon sarcophagus-ship, and his almost-reckless maneuvering of Stamets into jumping the starship into his home continuum becomes obvious in hindsight once the reveal of his true identity is made not long afterwards. Having recently rewatched the first two seasons, I was pleased with how well paced-out the slow burn towards Lorca's "turn" was handled, and it certainly wasn't unearned by any means.
 
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