williams_482 @ williams_482 @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

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This is a fun idea, and a nice website! Kudos.

One thing to be careful of: warn people not to use Memory Alpha hotlinks for images, or refuse to accept them if possible. They look like they work to whoever tries to post them, but that is illusory; the image is preserved in their browser cache but is not visible to anyone else.

Felt a bit too obviously like mid-season filler or something. Though I didn’t hate it.

As far as I'm concerned, the weakest parts of the show were the parts that tried the hardest not to be "mid-season filler": creating and resolving the doctor's insane daughter-in-transporter-buffer situation, trying to set up a future "big bad" situation with Sybok, etc. I was very concerned from Alex Kurtzman's description of this current season many months ago that they might have learned the wrong lessons from the first season, but thank goodness that they seem to have stuck with what made the first season good: brilliantly executed character driven episodic storytelling.

Much to my own surprise, I'm a complete sucker for this budding Spock/Chapel romance. I just want these two beautiful people to be happy together, damn it! We all know it's doomed, unfortunately, and I hope that whatever inevitably destroys it doesn't turn out to be too painful for the characters involved. Spock and Chapel are obviously not engaged in a romantic relationship in TOS, most obviously in Amok Time when such a pairing would have rendered the entire story trivial.

Someone mentioned in a previous thread that Spock's Pon Farr (seven years before Amok Time) is closing in. I was skeptical in that thread that they would choose to touch on it then, but the events of this episode do make that seem quite a bit more likely, if (again) increasingly difficult to square with Amok Time.

Well that definitely sucks. Sorry you had to deal with that.

Surely, given the events of TOS Amok Time, this will be neatly dealt with between Spock and T'Pring. It won't even merit an episode without a foreign source of drama lumped in.

The first scene of the first episode, even.

It seemed a perfectly harmless and appropriate volume to me listening on headphones. Perhaps your bass needs adjustment.

I thought this episode was fantastic.

The pacing was good, the interactions between Kirk and La'an were fun, and the closing acts were a real gut wrench. Being forced through such a traumatic situation and completely unable to talk with anyone about it is a piece of the time travel/Prime Directive secrecy that Star Trek hasn't really dug it's teeth into before, and there's clearly something very powerful to work with here.

Also, hilarious use of their immortal chief engineer. In retrospect, no surprise that someone in that position wouldn't maintain exactly the same hobbies and skills throughout the centuries, and also no real shock that this particular individual got her jollies stealing priceless artwork. And then arguing statute of limitations when she is challenged on it centuries later? Brilliant.

I do not give the slightest of damns about a TOS one-liner placing Kahn in the 1990s. This is a good story which wouldn't work properly otherwise, and that was a poor choice from writers who couldn't have possibly known better. Absolutely do not care, and so much happier for it.

After a fairly meh first episode, SNW S2 has reeled off a pair of real bangers. Looking forward to the next installment.

There are some huge fans of shittydaystrom on the team here, we'll definitely be hosting a community for that eventually. For the moment, we're worried about fracturing users by creating too many different communities.

If you have a shittydaystrom appropriate thing you want to post, stick it in /c/Risa. I'll upvote it.

This was an absolute gem. I don't have much of substance to add just now (except that those dress uniforms are very nice), but after being on the whole disappointed by the season opener I am extremely pleased with this episode. Definitely one of the strongest in the show so far, which is no small feat.

That's actually an excellent point with early Discovery, a connection which had not occured to me despite working on this morning's post. Discovery absolutely does try to do this, and for the most part it works; it only really falls apart when the show shifts to extremely grandiose storylines and feels the need to put Burnham in the middle of all of them. The early goings, essentially a war story told from the perspective of some science specialists who really ought to be the ones in the middle of those situations, makes considerable sense.

(Continuing in the comments...)

Even the ultimately disposable characters got real development. Prime Georgeou is the most obvious example: dead after two episodes, and yet there is no question in a viewer's mind as to why she's such a highly regarded captain, why Burnham is so affected by her loss, or why Saru feels so hurt to have been robbed of a chance to learn under her. But even the redshirts got a decent look.

Ensign Connor is just another guy at a console on board the Shenzhou. His ultimate fate is to have that console blow up in his face and then get shot into space, all of which happens in the show's opening two parter. And yet somehow, he gets more effective sympathetic characterization than any bridge crewer on Discovery, with the possible exception of Ariam's brazenly telegraphed pre-death sob story.

Amidst the preparation for Burnham's spacewalk, a simple pre-chaos demonstration of what this starship and this crew look like executing relatively routine tasks, Connor is the one charged with coordinating between Burnham and the bridge. He does so in a delightfully charming manner:

Commander Burnham, this is Ensign Danby Connor. On behalf of Captain Georgiou and the entire crew of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, we'd like to welcome you to flight 819 with non-stop service to the object of unknown origin. The temperature outside is a brisk minus-260 degrees Celsius. We are forecasting some mild debris, but anticipate a smooth ride.

Pleasant and humorous, maybe a little loose by modern military standards, but not unprofessional or disruptive. I already like this guy!

40 minutes later, we're at war. Connor's console blows up in his face, and he staggers off to sickbay but gets lost, winding up outside Burnham's cell. Delirious, he asks several jumbled questions, culminating in this:

Why are we fighting? We're Starfleet. We're explorers, not soldiers.

It's a touch on the nose, perhaps, but Sam Vartholomeos sells it pretty well: genuine distress, from a man robbed of his filter by severe trauma. You can't help but feel bad for the guy.

And then blam, he's sucked out into hard vacuum. Ouch.

Compare this to the the Bridge crew on Discovery come S3. We've had an awful lot of time to get to know Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Nillson, Bryce, etc, but it's somehow never happened. We know Rhys tried to kiss Tilly at the party in Magics, we know Detmer is proud of her piloting skills, Owo grew up in a non-believer luddite colony, and those last two seem to get along pretty well, but that's basically it. As a result, when these characters are all tossed into an allegedly doomed circumstance in the season 3 finale, we have basically no emotional connection with them and only barely care about their sacrifice, or alternately their Deus Ex Machina salvation.

To give them some credit, the writers did make one real attempt to make people from these cardboard cutouts. The closing scene from 3x03 People of Earth features the above five plus Tilly going down to earth to see a tree on the Starfleet Academy grounds.

In theory, this seems like an appropriate scene and a decent way to give these guys a little characterization, but in practice it feels flat. The actors (with the exception of Wiseman, who actually moves around) seem like they don't really know what to do, and just wind up either sitting or standing around awkwardly. Dialogue is brief, clipped, betraying nothing particularly personable. I admit I lack the expertise to tell if the problem is in the script, direction, or the actors themselves, but at least one of those things needed to change. Compared to Connor's lightning likability, this is a weak effort.

Early Discovery was willing to tackle difficult topics

There is a major missed opportunity in transition from early S1 to the subsequent efforts: the decision to handwave off or outright discard the tougher questions represented by Lorca and Tyler.

Lorca is presented as a military man through and through: a well studied pragmatist and a harsh but effective motivator, cognizant of the demands of war and willing to do what he judged best to protect his country. This is a kind of person Star Trek rarely attempts to portray, and even more rarely in a positive light. I've read quite a few accounts from people with military backgrounds who were quite fond of this character, finally shown a captain who thought the way they'd been trained to.

The idea that a nation of Chamberlain's might occasionally need a Churchill is hardly a novel one, and given the surprising popularity of Section 31, it's not exactly a controversial take even among Star Trek fans. But actually keeping character like Lorca around gives the freedom to poke and prod at the boundaries of where morality and military necessity overlap, and the show is under no obligation to present him as definitively good or definitively bad.

Even better, Lorca is an excellent avenue to explore trauma. Blindly grafting everything we see in these first nine episodes (except the MU jump itself, and Lorca's bizare protectiveness of Burnham) onto the genuine article Lorca instead of his mustache twirling counterpart from the evil dimension, we get a nearly broken man defined by his pain, plagued by memory of the crew he not only lost, but felt duty bound to pull the plug on. He is desperate to keep himself in the big chair and doing what must be done to save the Federation from an existential threat, and willing to fall into a rabbit hole of deceptions to do it. How far can he keep that up? At what point would he break down? And can his efforts ever really be justified?

But that disappointment comes a cold second to Ash Tyler. There's hardly a surplus of honest, serious stories about male rape victims these days, which is a reason of it's own not to shy from examining this one. But the story we got of a POW who survived seven months in a Klingon prison by encouraging otherwise unwanted advances from his captor is uniquely horrifying, and the portrayal bears that out in full force. Tyler going into shock upon seeing L'Rell again is evocative, and the flashbacks we see are horrific to the point that I found them genuinely uncomfortable. His dialogue with Burnham at the end of Into the Forest I Go is heart wrenching:

BURNHAM: I need to know something. You put on a facade. Like everything that's happened to you just washes off. I actually envied that about you. But when you saw that Klingon... Who is she to you?
TYLER: I think you already know.
BURNHAM: You were her prisoner.
TYLER: Yeah. Her name's L'Rell. She's the reason I've had nightmares... every night since Captain Lorca and I fled her ship. She's also the only reason I'm still alive. Two hundred and twenty-seven days. But it only took one to realize I wasn't gonna make it out alive, not unless I made a choice.
BURNHAM: What did you do?
TYLER: I survived. That... That Klingon... was more than just my captor. She was my torturer. One who took a particular... interest in me. And I saw a way out. A way to live past day one, day ten, day 20, day 97... I encouraged it. Her sick affections. Her obsession with me. Because if I hadn't, I'd be dead, like all the others. And I got out. I get to keep living my life. But the thing is... if none of that had happened, I wouldn't be here. On this ship. With you. And that almost makes it... worth it. Is that weird?
BURNHAM: No. I'm glad you're here, too. You get to live your life, the way you deserve to. Not at war... but at peace.
TYLER: I found peace. Right here.

In the real world, these are not situations that resolve cleanly. There is a road ahead for a real Tyler, but it's a long and hard one, laden with complexities I'm unqualified to describe. Star Trek has a long history of touching on these sorts of issues, but by and large the resolutions amounted to a few words of wisdom before warping out of the system and moving on to next week's quandary. Discovery as a genuinely serialized modern story was well positioned to buck that trend and really dig into these sorts of difficult topics, and the show's opening acts left them well positioned to do that. That this emotionally charged setup was crafted essentially by accident as cover to bust out two different varieties of villain in disguise is a tragedy all of it's own.

Those two are of course the most emotionally charged examples, but they certainly aren't the only places where the show tackles some classically Trek plots. Chief among them is the Tardigrade, which in a mere three episodes plays the part of a monster, the surprising final piece in a wondrous machine, and a terrified victim whose suffering and very survival is weighed against the lives of the crew. Quite the slate of roles out of a guest star alien who doesn't talk.

All in all, Discovery's opening act was a well planned, well executed example of serialized storytelling which still embraced the kinds of moral choices and emotional struggles which have been a Star Trek staple since the beginning. Somehow, it manages to be closer to both classic Trek and to the prestige serialized shows that became so popular in the last 15 years (and were commonly requested before Discovery was ever on the drawing board) than any of the subsequent live action efforts we've seen. It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.

This is terrible, horrible, and awful, so naturally it's a perfect fit.

Welcome aboard, it seems you'll do fine here.

Yeah, well, other than that he was great!

This is a major milestone guys. Our first troll!