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

[TJPC]

To bad there isn’t another company willing to take over Discovery. I’d like to see at least 2 or 3 more years.

 

[KPmusmag]

I was kind of surprised that they did not

Spoiler

repair all of the weather towers since they had figured out the tech.

 

[TonyD]

Maybe they did. Was never mentioned either way

 

[KPmusmag]

Maybe they did. Was never mentioned either way

I was going by the graphic at the end that only had the same one green section.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I liked the idea of picking up those dangling threads from The Chase, but I’m disappointed that it’s all about stopping a universe ending threat of something being used as a weapon in the hands of the wrong people.

One big thing that missing is is the sense of awe. What is the meaning of life? "The Chase" gave us one answer. And whoever finds the Progenitors' tech will presumably have a different one.

I'm also not so sure what makes this tech different from regular genetic engineering. When I watched "The Chase" before this season of "Discovery", I didn't really think of the Progenitors' technology as something unique. It was important because it was first, and because it played an important role in the origin stories of most of the humanoid species in the galaxy.

The Federation's genetic engineering expertise is limited because most forms of it have been banned for centuries. But we've seen plenty of other non-Federation worlds that have used genetic engineering to create and mold life. The Illyrians in SNW are one example. The Founders in DS9 are another.

I’m tired of these major incidents where only one person - Michael Burnham - can save the day. You obviously expect the ship that is in the show’s title to be the one sent, but at the same time, all of the previous Trek shows managed to go on important missions that didn’t hang on so religiously to the idea that there was only one competent captain in the fleet. It was just usually the Enterprise-D’s turn to deal with a certain area of space or something that didn’t come down to this overused trope about one individual being more competent than everyone else combined.

I think TOS was a bit guilty of that with Kirk. But all of the shows have the conceit of the same four or five main characters solving everything episode after episode. In reality, a ship with hundreds of crew with varying focuses and expertise would have hundreds of people contributing to solutions.

I can also tell you my emotional connection to the show and the characters has been pretty much spent after all of the seasons of having characters make choices that put their positions or standing at risk, being asked to bid an emotional farewell to the character, and then having them come right back. Culber dies, now he’s back. Tilly leaves the ship, now she’s back. Book gets sent away, now he’s back. It just makes me not believe in any stakes or threats of consequence dangled in an episode. “If you do that, then this will happen to you.” Except no, it won’t.

This is definitely a valid criticism. I've also personally just never grown invested in the characters like I did on the other series. I care about every single main character on SNW. I can't really say that about any of the main characters here. I think part of that is due to all of the behind the scenes turmoil, such that the show's had an identity crisis every couple seasons.

Both TOS (“The Apple”) and TNG (“Who Watches the Watchers”) did this story better.

While all three episodes involve unplanned violations of the Prime Directive, I do feel like they each told a different story.

"The Apple" was a pretty straightforward allegory about the story of Genesis, which Spock pretty much flat out says at the end.

"Who Watches the Watchers" was an exploration of the immediate consequences of breaking the Prime Directive, and Arthur C. Clarke's law that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"Whistlespeak" is about the Butterfly Effect, or the road to hell being paved with good intentions. The Denobulans built the towers as an act of benevolence, to give a species with a similar origin story to their own a boost toward civilization. But the technology they used to make the towers had a finite operating life, and as it failed the Halem'nites' entire culture was transformed by what transpired as a result. Even though the Denobulans never exposed themselves to the Halem'nites, they contaminated their culture on a massive scale long before Discovery's arrival. Kreel chose that planet for his clue with purpose, so that whoever was hunting for the Progenitor tech would have to confront what happens when you play God.

I rather liked it...more than the previous eps from this season. Of course, as soon as "race" came up, I remembered that Tilly liked to take runs around the decks of Discovery back in Season 1.

That's a good point. On the other hand, not to be shallow, but Mary Wiseman has put on quite a bit of weight since the first season. And even setting that aside, Tilly was competing against people from a pre-industrial civilization that are presumably engaged in some form of hard labor every single day just to survive. It beggared belief for me that someone who had been sitting around Starfleet Academy for months would be able to outcompete all of them. I think I needed a line about the natives' physical endurance being far less than humans', much like humans' physical endurance is far less than Vulcans'.

I was rather surprised, given how the Federation had fallen on such hard times during the In Between years that the Prime Directive was still considered so damn important.

I don't really find it that surprising. The Prime Directive is essentially a policy of non-interventionism. And given the severely limited resources of Starfleet during the Burn, not getting involved when they shouldn't would have been a greater imperative, not a lesser one, because those resources needed to go toward more mission-critical tasks.

I assume that a Red Directive mission pretty much allows Michael to do whatever she thinks is necessary. Blow up the entire planet if it means stopping the science (which can clearly be weaponized) from getting into the wrong hands. If anything, I thought the references to the prime directive to be out of place (from a writing point of view).

I agree. She got the next clue, and that should be enough to forgive any of the sins she committed along the way.

I have inferred (because the show seems disinterested on elaborating, which is a shame) Red Directive missions to be super secret and giving the captain unfettered discretion to whatever needs to be done

Much like the Omega Directive, I'm also assuming that it supersedes all other regulations including the Prime Directive. And much like the Omega Directive, I imagine that they're only issued when the survival of whole intersellar civilizations are at stake.

I make the same constant mistake in my life: start to watch a show I want to focus on when I'm struggling to stay awake. Mea culpa, I fell asleep halfway through "Whistlespeak" last week. I woke up and promptly went back to the last thing I remembered seeing and managed to finish the episode.

I didn't get to the episode until tonight, because if I'd tried Thursday night, Friday night, or last night I know that the same thing would have happened to me.

This one felt mundane in the first 20 minutes and then turned into something intriguing

I was hooked pretty much from the beginning, because I really enjoyed how truly alien this world was, and how much time the writers had devoted to developing a distinct culture.

I was fascinated by this primitive culture having had three gender identities, evidently distinct from two biological sexes, since very early on. We clumsily use a singular "they/them" for non-binary people in English because the concept of a non-binary gender identity is fairly recent, and English is very old. Presumably the Halem'nites have distinct singular pronouns for their third gender, which get reduced to "they/them" by the universal translator for the English-speaking Burnham and Tilly.

It's about something important, everyone says the right things...the Hugh/Book scene has more to it, to me, than the A plot. Maybe I need to go back and rewatch this at some point.

Even though the execution is extremely clumsy, I feel like Culber's storyline is the only one grappling with the broader implications of what they're after. Discovery is basically chasing after their makers, and Hugh's the only one trying to come to terms with the spiritual dimensions of what they are engaged in.

What I didn't like is Kovac showing up to provide information because the plot couldn't do it organically.

I get what you're saying, and why it feels unsatisfying. But I also think it makes since that given what they're after, the Federation would have its best people working on it.

I do wonder about Kovac's void space though. If you can beam into it from anywhere, and then beam out on the other side of the galaxy, it seems like you wouldn't need the spore drive or the slipstream drive to cover vast distances more or less instantaneously.

I was kind of surprised that they did not

Spoiler

repair all of the weather towers since they had figured out the tech.

Given how much of a mess of things they'd made already, they probably didn't want to mess things up anymore. But with the knowledge that Discovery provided to help the Halem'nites maintain their working weather tower, they could probably venture out and repair the others as well.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I was frustrated this week that Moll and L'ak just happened to break down, allowing both the Federation and Breen to track them down. It would have been nice if the Federation had outfoxed them for a change instead and lured them into a trap.

The fun dichotomy with Moll and L'ak is that on one hand, they're smart enough that Moll is smart enough to be strategizing three or four steps ahead even as she's clutching La'k's not yet cold corpse while on the other hand they're dumb enough to think that their distract and run plan would work.

At some point, Stamets got turned into Discovery's de facto chief engineer, and I think that was a mistake. They should have kept him as spore pilot and science officer, and let Reno be chief engineer. I enjoyed her O'Brien-ing along as she recollected her sketchy pre-Starfleet pursuits before the time jump.

The best part of this episode for me was the way it kept putting Book in parallel situations to situations he was in last year, and showing him making better choices this time around. He's actually learned from his failures, and that is surprisingly rare on television.

 

[Sam Favate]

I thought Erigah was the best episode yet this year. Actually, it was the best episode since season 2.

 

[Wayne Klein]

I agree completely. Aside from the scene at the beginning with Moll and L'ak, it was a budget-saving bottle episode that took place entirely on the show's standing sets.

But wow, what a bottle episode. I'm mostly sick and tired of time travel episodes too, but this had a unique spin on the concept with very clear rules. And we got to experience the totality of Discovery's journey, going back to when it was built all of the way forward closer toward the "Calypso" Short Trek decades in the future.

And making Season 1 Burnham the main antagonist of the episode? Brilliant. Sonequa Martin-Green really sold the journey Burnham has been on over the course of the series, to the point where the body language when S1 Burnham fights S5 Burnham is completely different between the two versions. S1 Michael is more ferocious, but S5 Michael has far more self-control.

Meanwhile, the specifics of the anomaly that carried S5 Burnham and Rayner through the time jumps intact, as well as Stamets's unique hybrid physiology carrying his consciousness through the time jumps intact, gave the captain and her first officer an opportunity to figure out how to work effectively with one another, while the ship's sort-of chief engineer provided a mirror to Rayner showing him who he was and what his time on Discovery has made him.

The time jumps also showed Rayner all of crazy shit that Discovery had been through before he came aboard. He would have read about these events on the ship's logs, but it's a different thing to actually experience them. Part of the chip on his shoulder is that he went through the shit during Burn and faced all of these hard and even impossible choices, and Discovery by contrast felt too soft and cuddly. Now he understands that they've been through plenty of shit too, and that's part of why they're all so close to one another. After all, the OG crew of Discovery left all of their family and friends behind when the ship jumped centuries into the future. In many cases, the only people they have in the galaxy are the people who made that leap with them.

Even though only six hours elapsed of story time, and basically left Discovery right where it was when the episode started, it did wonders for integrating

The question that always bugs me about these episodes is why don’t the past selves remember what occurred? unless it caused an alternate t8me line branch or some such thing or the time line adjusted for it. It should have come to Burnham but then the suspense may be eliminated if it did already occur in the original timeline. Clever concept for an episode though.,

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The question that always bugs me about these episodes is why don’t the past selves remember what occurred? unless it caused an alternate t8me line branch or some such thing or the time line adjusted for it. It should have come to Burnham but then the suspense may be eliminated if it did already occur in the original timeline. Clever concept for an episode though.,

They actually explained that in the episode. The events of the time loop don't replace the actual events in the past until the time bug completes its cycle. Since the time bug was fried before that cycle completed, the only people who remember that cycle are Season 5 Burnham, Rayner, and Stamets.

 

[Wayne Klein]

They actually explained that in the episode. The events of the time loop don't replace the actual events in the past until the time bug completes its cycle. Since the time bug was fried before that cycle completed, the only people who remember that cycle are Season 5 Burnham, Rayner, and Stamets.

Ah thanks, I must have missed that part. It was a creative bottle show. I’m liking this season quite a bit. It improves on the previous two seasons. They had promise but the writing just wasn’t there for me,

 

[jayembee]

Here's an interesting piece I came across:

30 Years Later, Star Trek Dropped a Sneaky but Massive Easter Egg

In 'Star Trek: Discovery,' the year 2371 is referenced in the distant future of 3191. But why? It turns out it was one of the most important years in Star Trek history.

www.inverse.com

 

[Jason_V]

Trailer for 5x8 "Labyrinths"

Spoiler

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

The A-plot with Burnham and the scientists' final test was meh for me. We've seen plenty of trapped in a simulation stories before, and this wasn't exactly a standout. And I didn't like that it all came down to some reductive psychobabble.

But I liked the B-plot with Moll and the Breen quite a bit. That story wasn't about jumping through predetermined hoops like Burnham's was. Moll learned more about Discovery and more about the Primarch, weighed her options, made choices, and then went all in on a huge calculated risk.

And the Primarch being a selfish, unprincipled asshole, rather than emblematic of the Breen as a whole, felt right to me. I would imagine that every civilization has them. He made two crucial mistakes: The first was being needlessly cruel and dishonorable. The second was counting his chickens before they hatched.

The reference to the Breen as gelatinous was interesting, suggesting that L'ak's green solid form isn't a constant. When he first lowered his mask, he looked kind of gelatinous.

 

[Sam Favate]

I groaned when the secret to the clue was Burnham discovering and expressing her feelings. This show is always the same.

 

[Jeff Cooper]

Star Trek: Self Discovery?