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You bring up an interesting distinction, actually: stuff like that and Data using contractions, etc. are definitely signs of oversights rather than deliberate moments on part of the cast and crew. With Discovery though, it's a lot closer to one of my biggest pet peeves that seem to pop up in a lot of modern media: when writers feel the need to make every character super snappy, quick-witted, sharp, and critical, feeling like they're writing the characters from their own point of view rather than that of the characters themselves. This was the number one turn-off for me when I watched Birdman.

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Five things I learned from watching this week's Discovery:

  • Science still matters on Star Trek.
  • Context isn't king; character is. I like that this is turning out to be a character driven show.
  • Bitchy gay guys apparently talk the same no matter which century it is.
  • Discovery's Starfleet Registration is NCC-1031. So does Capt. Lorca work for Section 31 or what? Or is this the genesis of 31?
  • I'm sorta digging this in spite of myself.

 

 

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12 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

Science still matters on Star Trek.

 

Yes, though Discoveries attempt at techno babble so far havent been very strong. 

Good Star Trek technobabble makes the silly science BS look plausible, here I never got any idea how the spores are supposed to work. maybe that will come.

 

12 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

Context isn't king; character is. I like that this is turning out to be a character driven show.

 

Yes. TNG was storydriven rather than character driven, the others were a mixture of both. I guess Discovery will eb also. 

Of all the new characters introduced though I liked exactly one. They need to tone down Stamets or he's  be more awful than Bashir in season 1 of DS9. 

Tilly was annoying, but I will that will change. Lorca was good.

 

12 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

Bitchy gay guys apparently talk the same no matter which century it is.

 

Is that the gay guy, I didnt know. No matter. He was awful. Contemporary Lindelof level science geek dialogue. AVOID!

 

12 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

Discovery's Starfleet Registration is NCC-1031. So does Capt. Lorca work for Section 31 or what? Or is this the genesis of 31?

 

Would be hokey as hell if that were true. A covert organization putting their name on a ship's registry. Either it's a coincidence or a red herring...I hope. 

 

12 hours ago, Nick1066 said:

'm sorta digging this in spite of myself.

 

It's not bad. There's not a lot there yet though. It kinda reminds me of Parallax, the first post-pilot ep of Voyager. A lot of characters we dont yet know in a situation we're not yet familiar with. I'm not even judging it on the story, there wasnt much of a story. I'm mostly looking for indications of what could work on the show later on. 

 

The scenes with Burnham, Lorca and Saru worked for me, but very little else did. Not bad. just fairly un-engaging. It feels very early season 1 TNG/DS9/Voyager.

 

Next weeks is a little better I hope.

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23 hours ago, Stefancos said:

A Rathar is on the ship for some reason...

 

 

Looked more like a tardigrade to me.

 

So far, the way the show handles breaching security mechanisms beats all of TNG, DS9 and VOY added together.

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A Rathar is funnier though.

 

I guess the Glenn was doing some sort of dangerous experiments and something went wrong. Apparently the spores (???) killed the crew and that beast finished off the Klingons.

 

Btw, the Klingon doing the "shush" gesture with his finger to his mouth was hilarious.

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The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry

 

A dramatic and slightly ridiculous title for an episode that doesnt seem to warrent it much.

Burnham gets assigned to figuring out what the space monster is and how it can be used against the Klingons.

 

Turns out it was used by the Glenn to be able to navigate with the spore-drive in a display of Trek science that is both puzzling and interesting.

Discovery doesnt seem to go in for techno babble much. Apparently you can use mushrooms to travel around the universe in the blink of an eye, and apparently you need that space creature thing to be able to communicate with the spores.

 

This means Starfleet is essentially using lifeforms as a means of propulsion. My guess is somewhere along the line this will become an issue. (well it has to, since this is 10 years before TOS, and they werent flying on mushies)

 

All this stuff was kinda weird, but kinda entertaining. The chief of security got killed in another example of people doing something stoopid. Since were havent been made to care about the character I'm assuming this was done to open a position for Burnham later on.

 

Stamets was more tolerable this time, Tilly was just an annoying room mate with good advice. We finally met the Doctor, I guess he was ok. Once again the most interesting character was Lorca. Driving his crew to the max, but getting results. Isaacs is the best actor in this. I've no idea where they are going with Lorca, but I'm enjoying his performance.

 

Again not a whole lot of plot to talk about. A Federation colony is under attack, and Discovery is the closest ship (as always). Thanks to Burnham they get the sporedrive working and save the day. 

Meanwhile in the asteroid belt near the Binary Stars the followers of T'Kuvna have apparently been...sitting there for 6 months while supplies ran low.

 

Better than last weeks ep, if only just. I'm interested to see where the Klingon storyline will go, though the slow, choppy delivery of the Klingon language makes it all a bit slow and ponderous.

 

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4 hours ago, Stefancos said:

This means Starfleet is essentially using lifeforms as a means of propulsion. My guess is somewhere along the line this will become an issue.

 

Hmmmm. Didn't this happen in the Voyager episode "Equinox"? And wasn't that Captain basically considered to have violated the Prime Directive and essentially one bad dude?

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I can't remember to be honest.

 

They are obviously drawing Lorca as such a person. One who do whatever he can to achieve his objective. Which at this points seems to be to defeat the Klingons.

I hope there will be a bit more to him though.

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Take a look at Equinox on Netflix when you get a chance. It's one of the more passable Voyager episodes (a season finale two parter) but is most notable as being the episode that caused Ron Moore to leave Voyager in frustration after only a few weeks on the job.

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5 hours ago, Stefancos said:

 

Again not a whole lot of plot to talk about. A Federation colony is under attack, and Discovery is the closest ship (as always). Thanks to Burnham they get the sporedrive working and save the day. 

 

 

Just watched this. For once it wasn't that the Discovery was the closest ship...it was just the only ship that had the spore drive which would enable them to get them so far so fast.

 

I'm enjoying the show, and I agree with you that Lorca is the most interesting character. Though I also like the first officer, and find the other characters to be interesting to one degree or another.  I also like that they're not getting too bogged down in technobabble. The writers clearly want us invested in the character and the technobabble itself doesn't drive the plot (which was big failing of Voyager).

 

The Klingons, however, are a problem for me so far. Because of the clunky (and stylistically overwrought) subtitles it's hard to both follow what they're doing and relate to them as characters. The alien dialogue and way its delivered sort of puts them at a distance and unless they figure out a way to sort this I think it's going to be an issue long term, especially given that they're apparently going to be the primary antagonist on this series.  I only get a vague sense of who these Klingons are a culture, and if I wasn't so familiar with Klingons from TNG and DS9 (what the great houses mean, importance of honour, etc.) I think I'd find them even more frustrating than they already do. I was frankly a little bored with most of the Klingon scenes.

 

In terms of plot, it was fine.  I don't think this show is about plot. Though I have no idea why Starfleet would leave a ship Federation ship with a perfectly good dilithium matrix just floating there out there for anyone to scavenge.  And there really are striking similarities to Voyager's Equinox, right down to trapping a creature in a chamber and using it for propulsion.  I'm becoming more and more convinced we are seeing the genesis of Section 31.

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4 hours ago, Stefancos said:

After which he later did his own version of Star Trek Voyager, called Battlestar Galactica. ;)

 

Anyone kinda puzzled T'Kuvna's followers had apparently been sitting out there for 6 months?

 

It's a little weird they didn't send out a distress call. A bit of a plot hole for that one.

 

So I've decided to give this show a chance.  So far I am liking it but I hate the look of the Klingons. The Discovery is ugly looking too... I just can't like it at all. It looks like a squished U.S.S. Vengeance.

 

I can't help but wonder.... the ships registry is NCC-1031 the last numbers... 31 section 31. The prisoners of the shuttle noticed the security guards wearing black emblems and they had never seen that before.  The Captain the way how he acts, the experiment(s) and such. It makes me wonder if Section 31 either helped build or actually built the Discovery and the Captain is part of Section 31.

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I look at the Discovery and the experiments on board as the Starfleet equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

 

She's a pure experiment, built from the ground up as the testbed of the Spore drive.

 

RE: the Section 31 idea. It's possible.

 

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But we also know the Philidelphia Experiment led no-where. Or did it. It was a real project still shrouded in mystery.

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Someone needs to give the redheaded cadet a quarter so she can go downtown and have a rat gnaw that thing off her forehead

No blood boil

 

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The fact that the experiment didn't go anywhere is not surprising, especially given the unethical nature of it.

 

Torturing Ripper to get it to work would be abhorrent to Starfleet if they had a bigger window into what was happening on Discovery.

 

Were it not for the War, Lorca would have been drummed out of Starfleet for what he's done so far.

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11 hours ago, Stefancos said:

But probably not as silly as Lorca namedropping Elon Musk.

 

Seemed fine to me. Trek has always been name dropping (and even actor dropping) popular active scientists/technologists along with historical greats (Hawking) and fictional ones (Cochrane, obviously). Musk fits in nicely.

 

I'm patting my own shoulder for recognising the tardigrades a week before they were named.

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No, Musk doesn't fit in nicely. That line was embarrassing. And will be even moreso in 20 years.

 

Let him actually do something first before he gets named dropped like that.

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On 10/10/2017 at 0:53 AM, Trent B said:

I can't help but wonder.... the ships registry is NCC-1031 the last numbers... 31 section 31. The prisoners of the shuttle noticed the security guards wearing black emblems and they had never seen that before.  The Captain the way how he acts, the experiment(s) and such. It makes me wonder if Section 31 either helped build or actually built the Discovery and the Captain is part of Section 31

 

Section 31 works fine in the last 2 seasons of DS9, but they're not really something I would wanna see a whole lot of in other Star Trek shows. The secret government organization that answers to no one is such an cliched TV trope now. It's been done to death. 

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42 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

 

Section 31 works fine in the last 2 seasons of DS9, but they're not really something I would wanna see a whole lot of in other Star Trek shows. The secret government organization that answers to no one is such an cliched TV trope now. It's been done to death. 

 

The article I posted actually tells what's the deal with the Captain.


Section 31 appeared in a couple of episodes of Enterprise too (Malcolm was part of it for a short time). But yes I agree having an entire series set around Section 31 is not a good idea.

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I don't think the whole series will be about Section 31.

 

I do think, however, that the show will be about what happens when Starfleet's ethics are cast aside because of necessity, and Section 31 is part of what comes of that. I do think they'll mention it in one form or another.

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8 hours ago, Stefancos said:

Musk seems to be an entrepreneur before anything else.I wouldnt put him remotely near Hawkins in terms of actual scientific importance.

 

Scientific? No, of course not. But he's a driving force between cleaner cars, reusable space vehicles and manned space flight. Which fits in with Trek's basic spirit.

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I don't mind that the Klingons speak their own language (the times that alien races all speak English is over!) but I do have a problem with the sound of the Klingon language. And they have a prominent role in Discovery, don't they. :mellow:

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Klingons in the TNG era were rowdy, boastful, hard fighting, hard drinking warriors. Like Vikings but with a code of honour akin to the Samurai. 

 

Klingons here are completely humourless so far, rigid, stiff. I understand they wanted to make them look more alien, but make them interesting!

 

 

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Agreed with the Klingons on being it boring.  The Romulans got barely any screen time.  I and many fans have wanted to see a war with the Romulans and the Federation for a long time.  I'm tired of it being the Federation vs Klingons...

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