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

[Dave Upton]

The stream was seriously broken last night. I hope CBS addresses their infrastructure problems, because that's the one thing that could make me cancel.

Overall I enjoyed the episode and I'm looking forward to where Discovery goes next.

 

[Nelson Au]

I hope CBS took care of the bandwidth issues or whatever was the case last night. I hope I can see Lethe tonight.

That’s good news the series is having a second season. I guess we will learn eventually that Bryan Fuller’s original vision of different eras being explored each season will happen or not. It seems it was Les Moonves who shot that idea down. And what of Nicolas Meyer’s Khan series? I’m guessing that’s not going to happen.

 

[Neil Middlemiss]

Another very good episode. Boy am I loving this show!

 

[Nelson Au]

Just had a chance to watch Lethe. Agreed with the comments, interesting way to fill in the background of Spock and Sarek’s relationship. The next time I watch Journey to Babel, I think it will have more weight then it already has.

The scene at the end with Lorca and Saru was confusing, I bought that Lorca took what the Admiral said to heart and really did want to follow protocol, but yes, he might have had other motives. Or it was part of a plan they both had in expectation of the situation she finds herself in.

Tyler’s is doing a great job at integrating with the crew of Discovery. If he’s not who he is, that will be a surprise. Maybe his true colors will he revealed next week.

Agreed also that Cadet Tilly has been a fun and engaging character. I was wondering if Stamets was being so nice this week it had to either be due to the groovy drugs he used for the Spore Drive, or he’s been replaced with an alternate Stamets from the other side of the mirror.

Glad that CBS’s streaming partner fixed the problem. Variety had an article about the streaming issues, CBS said only 5 percent were affected. But the people commenting on the article mentioned if Twitter was an indicator, it was way more then 5 percent affected. http://variety.com/2017/digital/new...r-trek-discovery-1202596426/#article-comments

No one is complaining they had a holodeck on the Discovery? .

 

[Hanson]

It depends on the nature of the holodeck. If it's just a fancy VR, that makes sense. If it has the kind of tactile mass that's shown in TNG, then it's crashing into continuity problems.

Although Roddenberry didn't consider TAS as canon, the showrunners seem to be incorporating aspects from those episodes into Disco. There was a holodeck episode in TAS.

 

[Joseph Bolus]

TAS had a holodeck but it was in no way as sophisticated as what was later depicted on TNG.

The feeling I got was that this was (mostly) an enhanced full room hologram projector with just enough sophistication to allow for relatively crude simulations. That it looked so cool was just due to the overall upgrade of the special effects on this show.

 

[Carabimero]

No one is complaining they had a holodeck on the Discovery? .

If it is Section 31, that covers a multitude of sins...

 

[Harry-N]

Holodeck technology improves as time goes on, as one would expect. There's a crude holodeck on the Enterprise 1701 in TAS, and we are all aware that the Discovery is more advanced than the aging Enterprise, so it's natural that the (Heh!) "Disco tech" would be a little more advanced in that area.

Years later, early Enterprise-D crew members are seen going crazy over the latest in holodeck design in the very first episode. It's an amazing upgrade to them.

And within that same first season, the Binars are seen advancing the Enterprise-D's holodeck to even better specs. It all makes sense to me.

(Still LOL at "Disco-tech"!)

 

[Sam Favate]

I enjoyed this episode. I gasped when I saw the holodeck, but I'm okay with it, since it's not the same as TNG, and we are likely to have technology like it long before the 23rd century. The special effects can be a little trippy sometimes, like Burnham floating in space, etc. It certainly is a good-looking show. Overall, this was a positive step forward in the evolution of the show. Strange that there was no indication that anything was up with Stamets, and no follow-up from the end of last episode.

 

[Nelson Au]

I just watched the After Trek segment that followed Lethe. The second half of the segment covered the design of the aliens in the series, Vulcans, Klingons and Saru. For those who dislike the new Klingon designs, if you didn’t already know, it was Mr. Fuller who pushed for it. It was interesting to hear Neville Page discuss the designs. And he did the creature designs for the Abrams Star Trek films.

 

[Hanson]

The development of Sarek and Vulcan culture and politics will be fascinating to watch. In many ways, the revelation that Spock's refusal to join the Vulcan Expeditionary Force was not a mere, "he didn't do as asked", but was also wrapped up in his regret over Burnham and the termination of his "experiment" to integrate humans into Vulcan society. That regret, if we accept Sarek at face value, was not because of the pain and disappointment he caused, but because he made the wrong call by choosing Spock over the more than eager Burnham for the position.

It's also fascinating that the Vulcan high official refers to Bunham and Spock as "experiments", a term that Sarek does nothing to correct. Taken at face value, it brings into question his true feelings towards Amanda -- was she chosen simply to be part of an experiment to prove humans were just as capable as Vulcans? That her only qualification was that Sarek believed her to be capable of living on Vulcan and away from humans.

BTW, the name dropping of Spock is frowned upon by some fans as being non-credible retconning considering Spock never mentioned a sister. But he also never mentioned his father or mother until they showed up in Journey to Babel and never mentioned his brother until Star Trek V. If Spock mentioned sister Michael in TOS season 4, it would have been fine that he never mentioned her for 3 seasons. So what is the difference between that and Burnham being retconned as Spock's foster sister in Disco?

In any case, this exploration of Vulcan looks to be very fertile and fascinating. Looking forward to it.

 

[Nelson Au]

Regarding the Vulcan culture, did anyone else get the sense that they were referencing Enterprise and the way that series had characterized the Vulcans initially. They never trusted humans. So there’s that sense of prejudice. Plus the ongoing theme that each alien race wanted to maintain their purity and not be influenced or polluted by other ways.

 

[Hanson]

BTW, mutiny runs in the family. Spock was on trial for mutiny during the events of The Menagerie due to his unauthorized routing of the Enterprise to Talos IV.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Well, it took far too many attempts, but I think I finally have this CBS All Access thing working to a degree that I can live with.

This time, I tried signing up on the CBS All Access website (rather than in the app), and it appears that my membership is finally working at the commercial free level that I paid for. I also had to watch it through my wife's PS4 because the AppleTV still was not playing nicely with the CBS app. The picture quality on the PS4 wasn't as good as through the AppleTV, but the audio sounded better. Compared to the Showtime app, which is also part of the CBS family, All Access sucks. They really should have asked the team that did the Showtime app to build the CBS All Access app. But, it appears to be working, and I was able to catch up on the show legally.

I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but if anyone from CBS happens to be lurking around internet forums to see how Discovery is doing, let me say again - I was willing to pay for this show and tried to do so many times. It took more than three attempts across two devices over a month to actually get the service that was being offered, including reaching out to customer service. It was a lot of headaches and it was incredibly irritating to have paid the $10 to watch it without commercials and yet still be subjected to commercials due to app or subscription problems on the CBS end. I could have very easily decided to download it illegally, which wouldn't have cost me a dime, and would have taken less than a minute per episode to do. If CBS hopes to have people pay for this content, they need to make using the app as easy or easier than downloading it illegally. I was willing to put the effort in, but a lot of people won't be.

 

[Hanson]

The scars on Lorca's back were a triangle and a line. Another Section 31 reference?

Or

Spoiler

Is that an identifier for Section 31 members in the Mirror Universe?

 

[Blimpoy06]

The scars on Lorca's back were a triangle and a line. Another Section 31 reference?

Or

Spoiler

Is that an identifier for Section 31 members in the Mirror Universe?

Or is it the scar from a correctional device?

 

[Nelson Au]

You mean like

Spoiler

an Agonizer

 

[Hanson]

I'm not following you guys, especially Nelson.

 

[Nelson Au]

I didn’t enter my spoiler correctly. I just fixed it.

 

[Hanson]

I had the though earlier today that

Spoiler

maybe Tyler is who he says he is, but Voq is actually Lorca. The only reason it came to mind is because the Voq = Ash is so obvious, it's almost hard to believe anyone will be surprised by the reveal. Many sites refer to it offhandedly without spoiler tags because it's so obvious. So a true shock reveal would be Voq = Lorca. However, it's almost certainly not. Here's one more reason why -- Ash tells Lorca he's been on the ship being held captive by L'Rell for 7 months. But L'Rell was with Voq on T'Kuvma's ship between the Battle of the Binaries and Butcher's Knife, a period of 6 months. That means she was on the prison ship for a month tops, and not 7 months like Ash states.

I rewatched the "holodeck" scene again (this after having watched the entire episode four times already), and there is no indication that this is a TNG era holodeck. Other than Ash pressing buttons to open and close doors (which is, admittedly, problematic), they don't actually touch the Klingons and they don't run around the hallways of the ship. So it could mostly be construed as extra fancy VR but not the "photons held in a magnetic field" version in TNG onward. I fully admit I wouldn't be surprised if they use the holodeck in the future for hand to hand combat simulations with bat'leths and references to safety protocols. Then I'm back to scratching my head.

Just to add -- it dawned on me that Ash's door buttons could be virtual and he's not actually making physical contact with anything, just miming contact instead.