Comment Stream

Re: SNW S2: Charades

Oh good. Magic Fun Time With DNA™. A Trek staple...

Re: SNW S2: Ad Astra Per Aspera

So, did the Vulcan prosecutor Pasalk know that Una was going to win her case?

I mean, c'mon. How is he, of all people, not going to be familiar with Starfleet Code 8514? There's a look he gives when Neera asks Batel to read out the relevant passage which suggests, to me, that he knew all along that this was the logical play. His prosecution of the case was full-throated, but again that would only be logical - he's a prosecutor, he can't simply not do his job, and knowing that the law in this case actually favoured Una to a degree meant that he was free to do so without truly risking anything. It handily absolves Pike of covering for her - he used his discretionary powers as captain under 8514 to grant her asylum, this court case merely confirms that. And it means that Starfleet can point out to anyone disgruntled at the verdict that a genuine attempt to prosecute the case was made.

Re: SNW S1: Spock Amok

@Richard James - yeah, well. Canon and continuity are part of the price of entry to write in the Trek universe. If you don't want to worry about that then write in a later bit of the timeline.

Re: SNW S1: Spock Amok

The Good:
Anson Mount. Love the speech he gives to 'Spock' (actually T'Pring), a pity that T'Pring will have forgotten it/rejected it by "Amok Time".
Spock's nightmare sequence at the beginning. A rare look into his almost-schizophrenia regarding his human half, something that wouldn't truly be resolved until TMP...or maybe even the talk with his father after the trial in the 4th film.
Nice to see April again.
Also nice to see one of those TOS background ideas popping up again - the Federation and the Klingon Empire in competition with each other over bringing other races to their side. Aside from a caveat that I'm sticking in with The Kurtzman.
I like how Gia Sandhu as T'Pring pronounced 'Spock' when speaking in Vulcan exactly the way the Kolinahr high master pronounced it in TMP.
Both Gia and Ethan Peck did solid jobs playing the other's character.
Rather fond of how the R'ongovian captain, having stormed into the briefing room, immediately shifted attitudes once he was talking to a jovial fellow captain in Pike. A fun conceit, that continues to be played with later when they'll only speak to Spock...because it turns out that they practice a kind of "radical empathy" and take on aspects of whoever they're facing to better negotiate with them. Which is why they were so rude to the Tellarites before Pike and Spock entered the negotiations. Pike figures this out, plays the hunch hard and wins.
I liked that the Vulcan concept of "v'tosh ka'tur" (Vulcans without logic) got namechecked.
The VFX of the R'angovian solar sail vessel. Simply gorgeous.

The Bad:
I was right that the ship would be all back together again by this week even though it had taken enough damage to reduce it to scrap last time out. Still, not a first for Trek so I'll let it slide this time. Does beg a question though - even ignoring the fairly wild changes made to the design for STD/SNW just how much of this ship is actually the Enterprise as it was built in 2245? A huge chunk got taken out of the primary hull in STD's season 2 finale, then last week the ship was left with more hull breaches than actual hull and both nacelles looking distinctly second-hand. At some point Trigger's Broom/Ship of Theseus comes into play! It's even mentioned at the end that there's a hull plate on the primary hull that is the oldest unreplaced bit of the outer shell of the ship - which, of course, is right in a spot that was annihilated by the torpedo in the STD S2 finale, so isn't even that old.
I really am pretty sure that "Amok Time" strongly implied that Spock and T'Pring hadn't seen each other since childhood. I don't think it ever outright stated it though, which has given them the 'out' to show them together in this show. Still, doesn't sit brilliantly with me.
I'm all for having different story strands in the same episode, but this one felt a bit overly crammed. You've got the negotiations with the R'angovians, Chapel's commitment fears (amusingly, in-continuity she'll go from this to being engaged to Roger Korby in less than two years), Spock and T'Pring relationship issues, Spock and T'Pring body swapping (an unwelcome return to Brannon Braga-style plots, thought we'd seen the last of that with ENT), La'an and Number One doing whatever the hell they were doing, shore leave...

The Kurtzman:
La'an Noonien-Singh 🙄
During April's briefing he notes that the R'ongovians are now in talks with the Klingons - fine, all well and good - and also the Romulans aren't far behind. *record scratch* Hol' up. The *Romulans???* The race that retreated back behind the Neutral Zone following the Earth-Romulan War almost a century previously and won't actually be seen again in-continuity for another seven years? The Romulans who the Federation knew almost nothing about until that later encounter? FFS showrunners and writers, all you had to do was not mention them...and you couldn't even manage that.

Re: SNW S1: Memento Mori

The Good:
Anson Mount.
Actually, nearly all of the cast.
VFX team doin' their thang.
The Gorn communication method (light bursts Morse-ing out a code) was a neat touch.

The Bad:
I'm pretty sure the Gorn weren't known even this well to the Federation in TOS' "Arena".
This 'remembrance day' thing seems more suited to the Starfleet of the TNG era than the one of the 23rd century.
We already did the whole 'submarine warfare IN SPAAAAAAAAACCEEE' deal rather better in TOS' "Balance of Terror", DS9's "Starship Down" and TWoK.
If "everything" is offline in sickbay, how is M'Benga's daughter okay in her Magic Transporter Beam Of Preserving™? Or did they forget about her between last week and now?
Did we also forget that flying a ship around a strong gravity source is a quick way to travel back in time?
Not for the first time in Trek we see our ship taking faintly catastrophic damage (indeed, the structure of whole decks getting wrecked) that will doubtless be all repaired by next week. Hell, the corridor we see at the very end of the episode already looks pretty much immaculate.

The Kurtzman:
La'an Noonien-Singh 🙄
Once again we have an enemy vessel far larger than the Enterprise. In TOS you could have a dinky little Romulan Bird of Prey-type ship using an outmoded power source be a compelling threat. Now it seems the showrunners need the enemy to have overwhelming strength in order to achieve the same.
The episode coming to a shuddering halt in the mind meld sequence so we can wang on about Spock losing Burnham. Mercifully brief, and yet still somehow *wildly* irritating.

Re: DSC S4: Choose to Live

Once again, bits of this episode almost worked. Unfortunately, the 'A' Plot with the Burnhams was emphatically *not* one of those bits.

The other plot strands of the episode were much better though, IMO. The scenes on Ni'Var with Stamets and Book had some very good things going on. Stamets now unfortunately finds himself with a theory about the nature of the anomaly that's not borne out by the facts, and feels guilty that Book had to relive the memory of Kwejian being destroyed to figure that out. Book assuring him that "it wasn't for nothing" is a heart-warming moment. He's not over his grief by any means, but he's starting to be able to deal with it healthily. Good stuff from Tony Rapp and David Ajala (and Tara Rosling as Ni'Var President T'Rina, TBH). It was a pity that the episode couldn't spend more time on this plot - it would have been nice to see the Vulcan scientists actually working on what the anomaly is rather than just shooting down Stamets' theory. Still, we were never going to get answers in Episode 3.

The Trill scenes, with the effort to reincorporate Gray into a synthetic body, kinda worked too. The reappearance of Xi was a nice "hooray for continuity!" moment. Blu del Barrio playing Adira with an appropriate level of panic when it looks like things haven't worked. Wilson Cruz continues to shine as Culber. I can see this plot dividing opinion (because oh noes, the LGBTQ+ agenda!!!111one :p), but I didn't particularly mind it.

As for the 'A' Plot, annoyances abound. The resolution felt unsatisfactory on many levels which I think is maybe what the writer intended - it mirrors Burnham's clear dissatisfaction with the deal. But it could still have done with not feeling quite so...trite. J'Vini murdered a Starfleet officer. Her actions led to several other deaths. And she gets to go back to Ni'Var to face an uncertain amount of justice just because the Abronians were saved? With all the time that the episode spent on this plot, it could and should have been resolved with a bit more weight than it was. SMG and Sonja Sohn both utterly murdered much of the material that the writer handed them, which didn't really help matters. Hopefully that's Gabrielle out of the way again for a bit. And the resolution to the actual problem (the cryostasis pods not bringing the Abronians out of sleep) got fixed a bit too easily for me. Chalk one up for Michael Burnham, Galactic Hero, Famed In Song And Story™ I guess...

On a brighter note, Doug Jones continues to impress as Saru. Oded Fehr got a bit more to say as Vance this week, which was enjoyable. And Chelah Horsdal continues to be good as Federation President Rillak - she's a lot more willing to compromise in the pursuit of the greater good (rebuilding the Federation) than Burnham is, which makes for a neat contrast.

But...man. When the whole 'A' Plot of an episode makes you want to throw things...

Re: DSC S4: Kobayashi Maru

@Mac - "Since Discovery is Burnham's story, I feel making her captain will gel better with the writers' vision for the show."

The writers have a *vision*???

There's been precious little evidence of anything that you'd even charitably call a vision in three seasons so far. Just a bunch of stuff thrown at a wall and then the bits that stuck to that wall sort-of linked together with a whole lot of witless dialogue.

Re: DSC S4: Kobayashi Maru

It doesn't improve much, does it?

Pacing - schizophrenic. SMG - still can't act. Burnham - still *wildly* unintelligent. Twists - still telegraphed far in advance. And it all still wants to have the stakes of the MCU or similar, so now we've got whole planets being wiped out of existence by a huge Negative Space Wedgie. Because exploring deep space, discovering new civilisations, that's boring. No, we've got to have galaxy-ending stakes or GTFO. Because [reasons].

*sigh*

There was some good. I liked the scenes on Kaminar with Saru and Su'Kal. Music cues (particularly the "Archer's Theme" redux when they show the new space dock) and VFX were great, as usual. Occasionally the dialogue strayed into being actually good rather than irritating. There was the odd cool touch from the director's chair.

Overall, a definite 'meh' out of 10. Not the worst episode of STD, but no "An Obol For Charon" either.

Re: DSC S3: People of Earth

Well, that was a curate's egg.

The good first. It was clearly a Frakes show, tight direction with no unnecessary ShakyCam™ or wild spinning. VFX team on point as always. Grudge the cat is cute. Some of the actors (Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman and a few of the bridge bunnies) didn't suck.

But good *Lord* do they need to hire new writers for this show, because the batch they have right now are just not good. Continuity is still out to lunch (synthehol exists on the USS Discoball, so why was it a mystery to Scotty in "Relics"?). The plot walks into itself with an audible thud, twists handled with the subtle touch of a gold brick thrown at your face. Then stuff gets wrapped up all neat 'n' tidy with a pretty bow on it in five seconds because they realised that they were at the end of the episode runtime and needed to get to the credits. And yet the only reason there was a plot to be wrapped up is that dumb people did something dumb for a dumb reason - the Earth attack on a ship coming from Titan to try and get help. Now, I'm sorry but I just don't buy that an Earth not too far removed from the days of the Federation...they mentioned in the episode that it had been 100 years since the United Earth seceded - so the Federation lasted ~928 years all told (2161 to ~3089) and in less than a hundred years after that Earth people turned into genocidal maniacs?

Bull. ****.

It's not just the writing of course, though that continues to be the biggest problem. The guest cast didn't cover themselves in glory (either Phumzile Sitole was horribly miscast, or she's just not good enough to rise above the material when the writing quality nosedives). The music department got in the way at times and they can bloody well quit using the Courage fanfare, that should be reserved for much better work than this. And now SMG is playing Burnham in a lot of scenes with this weird kind of zen look. Well, it's either zen or she's completely off her face. I guess it's to try and show how it's been a year away from the crew for her and she's changed. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement on the wide-eyed panic that she spent most of S2 in.

tl;dr - this show *sucks*.

Re: DSC S3: Far From Home

This felt a bit like a season 2 show in all the worst ways. But ranking right up there was the bollocks with MirrorGeorgiou stomping Leland's corpse into organic mush.

Showing Leland's brain matter on her boots? Graphic, pretty unnecessary, but it didn't last long and hey - they 'needed' to show that she's evil, because TV audiences are apparently short-memoried and require this sort of thing reiterating. To then show Leland's remains getting scraped up? Wholly unnecessary, turning what was an attempt at drama into an attempt at shock value for no good reason.

MirrorGeorgiou is a complete waste of Michelle Yeoh. The sooner the character buggers off out of STD to a Section 31 series the better.

Re: DSC S2: Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2

@Paul - people keep saying that the first two seasons of TNG were awful, as if every episode in those two seasons was. I genuinely don't think that's the case. Yes, there was some rubbish - some of it offensively bad ('Code Of Honor', 'When The Bough Breaks', 'Shades Of Gray'...). But there were stand-out episodes as well - '11001001', 'Heart Of Glory', 'Arsenal Of Freedom', 'The Measure Of A Man', 'Q Who'.

So far, in two seasons STD has produced *one* good episode of Star Trek IMO. 'An Obol For Charon' was a genuinely good Trek story fighting to get out from underneath STD. I'm sort-of amazed at how little praise that episode generates. But then maybe not, because it's emblematic of how far away my impression of STD has been compared with others. Jammer rates this episode three stars for example - I'd give it one for the VFX, half for Anson Mount doing his best with the material, and zero for quite literally everything else about it. Plot points that make no sense, scenes where characters stand around talking for ages when time really would be of the essence, SMG sliding into an abyss of poor acting choices (she really can only do one face even vaguely well, that wide-eyed look of panic)...

And the cop-out ending, desperately trying to claim that canon is now sorted because they just won't talk about the ship or crew ever again in continuity. Well I'm sorry but *fuck* whoever wrote that and thought 'yeah, that will do'. If that's any indication of how poor the writing in this series is going to continue to be then I'm out.

Re: DSC S2: Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2

So, what did the Star Trek universe get out of the 29 episodes of STD so far? Did anything have any lasting consequence? The USS DiscoBall and spore drive are gone. So are the sphere data. A bunch of people have disappeared and aren't going to be talked about ever again. The Klingon war made it almost to Earth, before stopping and there seemingly being few repercussions or lasting effects from it.

So, with the greatest possible respect to all involved, WHAT WAS IT ALL EVEN FOR?!?!?! And what d'you suppose was the plan to get STD to sync up with canon *before* they wrote this sprawling mess of fairly epic VFX set pieces linked with clunky dialogue? Was there ever a plan to do so? Were they always going to shoot the DiscoBall into the future?

Because if so, if going to the 33rd century was always the plan...*WHY NOT ****ING WELL START THERE?*

Re: DSC S1: Will You Take My Hand?

*sigh*

So, we've got Burnham as a full-on Mary Sue. The one true saviour of the Federation's moral code. We've got the whole war arc essentially resolved instantly by handing control of a Big F***ing Bomb™ to one of the enemy. We've got MU Georgiou still in play somewhere for no good reason. And then they cap the episode by showing something that's referred to as the Enterprise but it sure don't look like the Enterprise...

Nope. Sorry. This whole season has been one mis-step after another, and now it's fallen over entirely and faceplanted the ground.

Re: DSC S1: The Vulcan Hello / Battle at the Binary Stars

I tried to like it. I really did. I can deal with the JJ-Trek set design, I figured I could rationalise the Klingon makeup change, I even decided I could live with the ship designs being a) out of place and b) extremely ugly.

But I can't get past the fact that I don't like very many of the characters presented so far, especially Michael Burnham. This isn't a bash on the actress - Sonequa Martin-Green is great, but Burnham is monumentally bone-headed.

Re: Star Trek (2009)

Shakespeare wrote what at the time was considered to be popular entertainment, and it was. The reason it survives is because he wrote very good popular entertainment. It is a mistake to assume to popular and artistic are mutually exclusive terms.

I take films seriously, it is the profession I'm working toward. So to me a film is never "just a film." That attitude leads to people taking the easy way out and if you look at the quality of films and filmmakers in the last decade people are producing quite a bit of crap and movie goers have gotten use to accepting it. Btw while I do differentiate films that are supposed to be entertainment strictly and films that are trying to say something about the "human condition" I still think they have to show some competence of the craft. For instance I've never heard anyone say of a film dealing with the holocaust that got the facts wrong "it's just a film", even if that film was complete fiction and the writer had leeway to do what they wanted. When a movie adapts a well loved piece of fiction and totally bungles it fans of the book ofttimes criticize. True a book and a film are two separate media, but if you have to so radically change a thing so that the only resemblance you have is a title and the names of some of the characters, then I say you should have just called it something else.

Which leads me back to Trek. SF fans who read books and SF fans who only watch movies are two different types of SF fans. I don't say one is better than the other but they are different. Elliott has a point. People who are fans of the new Abrams Star Trek and have never watched Star Trek before are a different type of fan than fans of the original show, or any of it's later installments. Mass appeal is not always a good thing if that mass appeal comes from catering to low expectations. For instance, Star Wars in '77 had mass appeal, but not because it was constructed to attain it. Lucas, at that time at least, was just trying to tell a story in a certain style. No one expected it to be a hit. He was trying to construct a good film first and foremost. As a result we still watch it today. Now Hollywood has the template for the disposable blockbuster. It's fun for an hour or two, but it's like Chinese food, who remembers it a year later? Abrams Star Trek to me at least fits that mode and that's a shame. Maybe in 30 more years a Ronald Moore type will reboot it yet again and make it something just a bit more than "just a summer movie".