Online Series: Star Trek: Discovery - III - Spock's Beard

[The Nemesis]

I wanted the original shouting spock from the OS pilot.

THE WOMEN!

 

[Blender]

I just watched all of the Short Treks.

Runaway - Mediocre and nonsensical. It's not a surprise that Alex Kurtzman wrote probably the worst of the four.
Calypso - Easily the best of the four. It featured none of the Discovery characters and didn't really feel like it had much connection to Discovery; rather, it felt like a general sci-fi short that was merely adapted to have a connection. No wonder I liked it.
The Brightest Star - Mediocre and head scratching. I got bored and web surfed halfway through. Like Runaway, not much effort was put into the writing.
The Escape Artist - Not as good as Calypso, but better than the others. I'm not a fan of this Mudd, but at least he can hold your attention and the twist at the end is decent.

In summary, two were as bad as I expected, one slightly exceeded my low expectations and one was surprisingly good. None of them had Burnham in them, though, so, in all, it's probably the best hour that I've spent watching Discovery so far (not that that's saying much).

I agree with pretty much everything here. Runaway was easily the worst one and for a 20 minute show had an unbelievable amount of plot holes and flaws. I found the The Escape Artist to be pretty corny though honestly. I had trouble taking anything in it seriously with how outlandish it all was.

 

[Osprey]

I agree with pretty much everything here. Runaway was easily the worst one and for a 20 minute show had an unbelievable amount of plot holes and flaws. I found the The Escape Artist to be pretty corny though honestly. I had trouble taking anything in it seriously with how outlandish it all was.

Yeah, The Escape Artist was pretty corny and hard to take seriously. Then again, there's room in Trek for an episode like that now and then (ex. The Trouble With Tribbles, Shore Leave) and they balance out the overly serious episodes (in this case, Calypso). The important thing, IMO, is that the silly episodes still be decently written (i.e. not like Threshold). The Escape Artist at least was straightforward and held my attention, unlike Runaway and The Brightest Star. That's not to say that I liked it, but it was better than the worst and second worst episodes to me.

 

[Blender]

Yeah, The Escape Artist was pretty corny and hard to take seriously. Then again, there's room in Trek for an episode like that now and then (ex. The Trouble With Tribbles, Shore Leave) and they balance out the overly serious episodes (in this case, Calypso). The important thing, IMO, is that the silly episodes still be decently written (i.e. not like Threshold). The Escape Artist at least was straightforward and held my attention, unlike Runaway and The Brightest Star.

The difference I find though is that for example The Trouble With Tribbles is fundamentally a serious episode with well written characters and story, but it's just executed in a lighthearted way because of the absurdity of the tribble infestation.

Threshold was attempting to be serious by the way. A better comparison to The Escape Artist is The Royale from TNG, where they are trying to be silly but it just didn't come together well. It's not as bad as say The Outrageous Okana which also was being silly, as that is one of the worst episodes of Star Trek.

Runaway was just stupid all around. Uninteresting characters, poorly written dialogue and plot, massive logical and continuity problems, etc. The Brightest Star isn't as bad as the basic story is alright (Suru from a more primitive planet ends up contacting Starfleet has potential), it's just done in a really bad and sloppy way.

 

[The Nemesis]

The eeeevil Georgiou/Section 31 spinoff show is apparently 100% a go.

It’s Official! Michelle Yeoh ‘Star Trek’ Spinoff In Development At CBS All Access

Argh.

I like Michelle Yeoh. I like her a lot. But her character was terrible and making a constant dark, grim, and gritty Section 31 show seems like overkill. The point of Section 31 was to be a contrast against the generally idealistic front-facing Federation/Starfleet. It was supposed to be that dark part of the future that the characters have to confront when the light is held up to it. Making a series about nothing but that means you lose that perspective and it becomes just another "morally gray people doing morally gray things for maybe the right reasons or the greater good" story that execs like to trumpet with marketing buzzwords like how it's "mature" and "explores uncomfortable grounds" and whatnot.

In other words it's more attempts to make Star Trek un-trek-like because suits don't understand that it's not the name that's popular, it's the idea it represents. And that even DS9, the grayest, most antithetical series to Roddenberry's original premise, still made sure that at the end of the day it was an optimistic and had characters conflicted by or disdainful of the Section 31 types who excused their amorality as necessary.

 

[Blender]

The eeeevil Georgiou/Section 31 spinoff show is apparently 100% a go.

It’s Official! Michelle Yeoh ‘Star Trek’ Spinoff In Development At CBS All Access

Argh.

I like Michelle Yeoh. I like her a lot. But her character was terrible and making a constant dark, grim, and gritty Section 31 show seems like overkill. The point of Section 31 was to be a contrast against the generally idealistic front-facing Federation/Starfleet. It was supposed to be that dark part of the future that the characters have to confront when the light is held up to it. Making a series about nothing but that means you lose that perspective and it becomes just another "morally gray people doing morally gray things for maybe the right reasons or the greater good" story that execs like to trumpet with marketing buzzwords like how it's "mature" and "explores uncomfortable grounds" and whatnot.

In other words it's more attempts to make Star Trek un-trek-like because suits don't understand that it's not the name that's popular, it's the idea it represents. And that even DS9, the grayest, most antithetical series to Roddenberry's original premise, still made sure that at the end of the day it was an optimistic and had characters conflicted by or disdainful of the Section 31 types who excused their amorality as necessary.

I'm still stunned that they have launched a spinoff series based on a terribly written character from one of the worst plot points of Discovery season 1. Mirror Empress Georgiou was so much worse even than prime universe Georgiou. How is this character going to carry a show when she isn't interesting or likeable in any way?

 

[Osprey]

Michelle has shattered ceilings, broken boundaries, and astonished us with her grace and gravitas for decades. - Alex Kurtzman

I can’t wait to see where it all goes – certainly I believe it will go ‘where no WOMAN has ever gone before!' - Michelle Yeoh

I'm getting the feeling that the folks behind Trek are going the way of Star Wars (ex. "The Force is female") and putting agendas ahead of good storytelling. "Let's build a show around Yeoh because she's a strong, ethnic female and that's more important than whether her character is any good." It seems like most of the decisions governing the directions of Star Trek and Star Wars nowadays are based on pandering of one sort or the other. Everything is either deliberately designed to challenge the brands' old image and appeal to new demographics or as fan service to the old-time fans. It's like, on one hand, they're boasting "This is not your parents' Star Trek/Wars," and, on the other, assuring "Look, it's still the Star Trek/Wars that you love because it has these characters and events that you're familiar with."

 

[Blender]

I'm getting the feeling that the folks behind Trek are going the way of Star Wars (ex. "The Force is female") and putting agendas ahead of good storytelling. "Let's build a show around Yeoh because she's a strong, ethnic female and that's more important than whether her character is any good." It seems like most of the decisions governing the directions of Star Trek and Star Wars nowadays are based on pandering of one sort or the other. Everything is either deliberately designed to challenge the brands' old image and appeal to new demographics or as fan service to the old-time fans. It's like, on one hand, they're boasting "This is not your parents' Star Trek/Wars," and, on the other, assuring "Look, it's still the Star Trek/Wars that you love because it has these characters and events that you're familiar with."

I think you are giving them far more credit than they deserve here.

Also, Star Trek has always been very progressive in their casting, that is hardly new. It's a bit disingenuous of these show runners to be acting like it is as well, but it's all about attracting viewers which is why they constantly talk about how great they are.

 

[Ducks in a row]

 

[Blender]

Holy shit that was terrible, even worse than I was expecting. Lone bright spot was Anson Mount.

 

[The Nemesis]

Holy **** that was terrible, even worse than I was expecting. Lone bright spot was Anson Mount.

I haven't watched yet, but now I'm scared.

After they were announced for the season, I did think for a bit that I would totally watch Mount & Rebecca Romijn doing a Pike's Enterprise series as Pike and Number One.

Also they damn well better do something with Cmdr Airiam.

I mean, you can't just show me this as an incidental background character with no context and then never follow it up:

She's a goddamn Lieutenant Commander. There's no way she's not a senior officer at that rank, and yet here we are in season 2 and not only do we not know anything besides her name, but I'd be hard pressed to say that her name was even spoken in the series and that the only way I even know it is from trawling the Star Trek Wiki.

Imagine if we made it into season 2 of TNG with Data just being there on the bridge and having never had any lines or backstory for the entire first season. It's baffling.

She's a ****ing robot or a cyborg or something. You can't tell me there's not an interesting backstory there that's worth exploring.

For that matter they probably need to do something with the ops/conn officers as well. The only thing I know for sure is the redheaded one hates Burnham because she got injured during the attack on the Shenzhou and has a prosthetic eye and weird cybernetic thing on the side of her head.

Star Trek is supposed to be an ensemble drama, not the Michael Burnham MarySuetopia hour.

 

[Blender]

I haven't watched yet, but now I'm scared.

After they were announced for the season, I did think for a bit that I would totally watch Mount & Rebecca Romijn doing a Pike's Enterprise series as Pike and Number One.

Also they damn well better do something with Cmdr Airiam.

I mean, you can't just show me this as an incidental background character with no context and then never follow it up:

She's a goddamn Lieutenant Commander. There's no way she's not a senior officer at that rank, and yet here we are in season 2 and not only do we not know anything besides her name, but I'd be hard pressed to say that her name was even spoken in the series and that the only way I even know it is from trawling the Star Trek Wiki.

Imagine if we made it into season 2 of TNG with Data just being there on the bridge and having never had any lines or backstory for the entire first season. It's baffling.

She's a ****ing robot or a cyborg or something. You can't tell me there's not an interesting backstory there that's worth exploring.

For that matter they probably need to do something with the ops/conn officers as well. The only thing I know for sure is the redheaded one hates Burnham because she got injured during the attack on the Shenzhou and has a prosthetic eye and weird cybernetic thing on the side of her head.

Star Trek is supposed to be an ensemble drama, not the Michael Burnham MarySuetopia hour.

Her name is definitely spoken in the first episode, and I think she has one line but otherwise just stands there again.

They cranked up Tilly being annoying to 11. She was worse than Voyager Season 1 Neelix.

 

[The Nemesis]

They cranked up Tilly being annoying to 11. She was worse than Voyager Season 1 Neelix.

 

[The Nemesis]

I'm like 5 minutes into the episode and I want to strangle Tilly already.

 

[The Nemesis]

Oh look

Spoiler

The guy that mouths off to and disrespects Burnham ends up dead. That'll teach you to question Commander Perfect

 

[Canadiens Ghost]

Haven't seen the first episode yet as I am deciding if it's worth investing any more time on this show. But I have a question for you guys/gals. How long will you keep watching if season 2 is as bad as season one was? Will you try toughing it out till the end in some hope that it can turn around like TNG did even though it is highly unlikely or do you have a breaking point (and have you already reached that point after episode 1 loll)?

 

[Blender]

Haven't seen the first episode yet as I am deciding if it's worth investing any more time on this show. But I have a question for you guys/gals. How long will you keep watching if season 2 is as bad as season one was? Will you try toughing it out till the end in some hope that it can turn around like TNG did even though it is highly unlikely or do you have a breaking point (and have you already reached that point after episode 1 loll)?

I'm going to give it 1 or 2 more episodes, and unless it improves a lot I will probably bail.

 

[The Nemesis]

Haven't seen the first episode yet as I am deciding if it's worth investing any more time on this show. But I have a question for you guys/gals. How long will you keep watching if season 2 is as bad as season one was? Will you try toughing it out till the end in some hope that it can turn around like TNG did even though it is highly unlikely or do you have a breaking point (and have you already reached that point after episode 1 loll)?

Against my better judgement I'll probably last to the end of the season, even if I only make it by snarking and griping about everything I don't like. But it's not like they're starting from a position of strength. But if nothing else I owe it to TNG's history to give it that much.

Also, as I continue watching the pilot:

Spoiler

1) Is every ****ing character in this going to be "quirky"? It's annoying.
2) So Pike takes an engineer off the Enterprise and she comes along to the Hiawatha. But does she do anything of consequence? **** no, she just stands uselessly in the background while Burnham saves the day. At least she's a red-shirt that manages to outlast one of her fellow crew members instead of dying a typical redshirt death. The only contribution she did have was "you got this, Burnham!" when Burnham saved Pike in the asteroid field.

 

[The Nemesis]

Also Pike wearing the updated TOS uniform only makes me wish even more that the rest of the crew wore those instead of the Enterprise-ish jumpsuits with the oddball metallic departmental colors.

 

[CaptainCrunch67]

Its almost like the director was sitting in a chair with a megaphone yelling "Faster, more energy, and throw more plot points in boys"

I laughed at the scene where

Spoiler

Pike gets the bridge crew to introduce themselves, because they realize that we don't really care about most of the bridge crew because they were like broken NPC's in a bad mmo.

Tilly needs to be ejected into space.

The elevator snot scene, really ripped off from the Orville.

 

[Blender]

Against my better judgement I'll probably last to the end of the season, even if I only make it by snarking and griping about everything I don't like. But it's not like they're starting from a position of strength. But if nothing else I owe it to TNG's history to give it that much.

Also, as I continue watching the pilot:

Spoiler

1) Is every ****ing character in this going to be "quirky"? It's annoying.
2) So Pike takes an engineer off the Enterprise and she comes along to the Hiawatha. But does she do anything of consequence? **** no, she just stands uselessly in the background while Burnham saves the day. At least she's a red-shirt that manages to outlast one of her fellow crew members instead of dying a typical redshirt death. The only contribution she did have was "you got this, Burnham!" when Burnham saved Pike in the asteroid field.

Spoiler

The entire pulsar/asteroid field part was horrible. From the jumbled mess of a high speed descent to the science officer being a moron who gets himself blown up (which no one even seems that bothered by except for Burnham actually, who is mildly annoyed at most). Good luck not dying when you are accelerating at incredibly high speeds and suddenly stop as well, not to mention trying to hold onto someone else while doing so. Then they get to the Hiawatha and the Tig Notaro character who is an engineer is also a multi-species surgeon because "bodies are just like machines". That might have been the dumbest line in the entire episode. I touch on this below, but this engineer doesn't understand how the transporter works but is so resourceful and sophisticated she can "read stuff" and transform her engineering genius into complex medical knowledge. Right...

So Burnham fixes the transporters while the two engineers stand around watching, one of which is the engineer of the ship that they are on... Afterwards when Burnham gets trapped, she is somehow able to run around and dodge things being ripped to shreds due to tidal forces from the pulsar's gravity without herself being ripped apart in any way. Completely ridiculous that any of them were able to survive gravitational forces like that while minerals and metals were being shredded around them. Also, if you're that close to a gravity well you will experience time dilation, especially the Hiawatha that was there for 10 months. Years or decades would have passed relative to the 10 months the Hiawatha experienced, or if it were 10 months for our crew it would have been much shorter for the Hiawatha. They also would have to deal with this when trying to get down there and save them since Discovery stayed well back from it.

Tilly was incredibly annoying every time she was on screen. They have somehow made her worse than last season.

Does every plot in this show need to involve a doomsday premise? Last season humanity was at risk of cultural or real genocide to the Klingons, and this season all life in the galaxy is at risk. For a show called Discovery they sure do almost none of it.

The massive gravity generator that magically folded out of a suitcase was laughable and completely necessary. What happened to the simple tractor beam?

Apparently Burnham can just stroll into Spock's quarters and go snooping through his personal logs. Does the Enterprise not have any kind of security at all?

The Enterprise was apparently disabled by scanning the signal, but still managed to fly to wherever Discovery was to meet up with them and they assumed that same thing wouldn't happen to Discovery as soon as they tried to scan the phenomenon they were going to investigate. Ridiculous, as was Pike's entire justification for switching ships.

Burnham solved all the problems and had the answer to everything. For a character that isn't interesting, is poorly acted, and written even worse, hinging the entire show on her is not going to go very well.

 

[Blender]

Its almost like the director was sitting in a chair with a megaphone yelling "Faster, more energy, and throw more plot points in boys"

I laughed at the scene where

Spoiler

Pike gets the bridge crew to introduce themselves, because they realize that we don't really care about most of the bridge crew because they were like broken NPC's in a bad mmo.

Tilly needs to be ejected into space.

The elevator snot scene, really ripped off from the Orville.

Spoiler

They had that introduction scene and I still don't know who most of them are because they never get lines or screen time anyways. They might as well just be extra deck chairs or computer consoles. Remember when Star Trek was an ensemble and everyone had something to contribute in their area of expertise? All those people aren't there because they push buttons, they are there because they have specialized knowledge and skills, yet on Discovery they are never shown to be useful in any way beyond being button pushers.

 

[Osprey]

That was hard to get through. It started out trying too hard to be deep and stylistic, as if the writers and director were copying a dramatic style that they'd seen in other premium dramas, rather than anything that's ever been in Star Trek before. In fact, throughout the episode, if it hadn't been for the occasional familiar name drop or image (like Pike, Sarek, the Enterprise or Spock), I might've forgotten that it was supposed to be Trek. In comparison, even though The Orville doesn't benefit from having a single familiar name or image, everything still feels far more familiar.

It's funny that they teased Spock throughout, like a carrot on a stick, as if we were eager to see him and ready to cheer (rather than cringe) when he appeared. We expected him to be in the premiere episode, but they subverted our expectations, those clever writers . They're no doubt dragging out his introduction to build anticipation and so that people can't just cancel their subscriptions after the premiere.

Speaking of expectations, at one point, Pike suggests to Burnham the value in keeping low expectations so that you're never disappointed, and I wondered for a second if the writers were giving a wink. Then again, Pike also suggested to Burnham that they'd have some fun together this season and "fun" (at least the kind that TOS, TNG and DS9 provided) is the last thing that I think of with this series.

I wasn't sure that it was possible, but they might've actually made Burnham even more hard to stand than last season. So much for listening to the criticism of her character in Season 1 and toning her down a little, not that I ever expected them to. They're probably no more open to the possibility of having made a mistake as the character that they put some of themselves into.

The one thing that I quite liked was the Pike character and Anson Mount's acting. It makes me wish that he were the star of the show. A series following Pike's adventures wouldn't be my first choice, but at least it would feel more like Star Trek.

Spoiler

It's ironic that the Enterprise science officer's cock-sureness and talking back to criticism and authority were portrayed negatively by getting him killed while they're consistently portrayed as positive, heroic qualities when Burnham exhibits them. She acts pretty much like that science officer all of the time, yet never receives her own comeuppance for it. I'm not sure if the double standard is because she's simply the star or because the writers actually think that behavior that's unflattering in a male character makes a female character appear strong and independent.

Something that annoyed me is how that engineer on the crashed ship appeared to have no pressing interest in being rescued. She welcomed them in like a homeowner receiving guests and talked on and on about everything going on before allowing the topic that she should've been most consumed with to even come up. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine because this trope shows up a lot in movie and TV. Whenever someone is found stranded or living alone in an inhospitable location and hasn't seen outsiders in a long time, he (or she) invariably treats any outsiders as either guests or intruders, instead of as potential rescuers, and is doing so well that he has to be convinced to be rescued. Sure, it's dramatic and subverts expectations, but it hurts suspension of disbelief. Just once, I'd like a stranded character to act like their survival was unpleasant and to welcome rescuers with open arms.

 

[johnjm22]

Every time I give my thoughts on a new episode of Discovery I feel like I'm repeating myself. This episode was awful. AGAIN.

I don't care about Spock and Michael's childhood melodrama.

The whole show has become a mishmash of ideas and tones that don't work together.

 

[johnjm22]