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ST - Discovery
Joebot wrote: And for fuck's sake, would somebody turn on the fucking lights on the bridge?!? How can these people work in near-darkness all the time??
Modern directors love near-darkness. They know that their show is going to be seen by many viewers in high definition, and the darkness is more forgiving in terms of set design, stuntwork, special effects, etc.
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I'm guessing that the engineer character whining about the military taking over his peaceful exploration mission is meant to stand in for the butt-hurt ST fans who can't get over that this is 2017 and everything is awful, Just Like Real Life. DS9's Dominion War arc is remembered fondly, but apparently less well remembered is the fact that that took place in a mature show that had already well-developed characters and in a world that still operated by more or less "classic" Trek conventions. I'm not blaming DS9 for this show, but it seems like many people took the wrong lesson from it. This is more like an canonical Axanar.
It is visually impressive and, at least on a small screen, rivals the Kelvin films.
All and all, I don't hate it, but I probably wouldn't miss it if it went away, which it probably will after this season (CBS has certainly done everything possible to keep it from an audience). Sadly, this is only sort of Trek we're going to get in visual form, and it might be time, or past time, to let it go. I realized in the last year or two that, despite having grown up with Doctor Who classic and finding the early seasons of the revival compelling, the show as it went on just wasn't for me anymore, and that was probably a lot harder than realizing that Star Trek might be "over."
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- ThirstyMan
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What a huge shame that you suckers in USA have to pay extra to see it with a load of shit you don't want.
I just continue to pay my Netflix sub which I think is $6/mnth to see this. Haha
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- Black Barney
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Rafael Silva wrote: I thought 4th epi had a strong 'weekly problem' but the writing was so lazy. The officer that suddenly decides to open the cage and ends up dead? WTF, that whole scene was idiotic. Also, Elon Musk? ffs
The Musk thing was ridiculous. I agree that the officer's behavior was undermotivated (and just stupid, obviously). I think what they were trying to go for was the idea that the captain had everyone so on edge that radical success right now was required. I'm not saying you didn't get that, and I agree that the execution was, shall we say, overly compressed for the sake of time/narrative efficiency. To beat a dead horse one more time, I think this would all work better if you actually saw a "real" Trek crew slowly losing its ethical/moral moorings than have some outsider come in as a kind of audience proxy and diagnose the problems. Doing it the way they're doing it sort of works, but because the captain is unlikable, the officer was a cipher, etc., the impact is diminished because we don't care about these people and kind of want to see them fail (and, of course, this being a prequel, we know that ultimately they do *not* fail at the macro level, which is another huge problem). This season would work a lot better as a single season as part of an anthology, as Fuller had intended; it's not clear how sustainable any of this is for longer than that (although the current crew claims to have season 2 plotted and season 3 sketched out, but what else are they going to say?).
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jpat wrote: To beat a dead horse one more time, I think this would all work better if you actually saw a "real" Trek crew slowly losing its ethical/moral moorings than have some outsider come in as a kind of audience proxy and diagnose the problems. Doing it the way they're doing it sort of works, but because the captain is unlikable, the officer was a cipher, etc., the impact is diminished because we don't care about these people and kind of want to see them fail .
That's a great point. Arguably the best episode of DS9 was "In the Pale Moonlight," where we watch Sisko make a series of ethical and moral compromises in order to serve the greater good (i.e, winning the war against the Dominion). Each step Sisko takes makes sense at the time he makes it, but leads inevitably to a another, then another, then another, until he's too far gone to turn back. The reason this works so well is that we already know Sisko by this point. Discovery tries to cheat and skip over all of that narrative hard work.
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I can see now that the federation will give up on this series changing...pre-Trek history tech...warp drive obsolescence...ok...because it hurts the sentient Tardigrade and is unethical.
We don't let human convicts exit their cells in supermax prisons without double and triple checks on restraints but its ok for a security officer to grab a rifle and open the door to a pen securing a known giant killing machine right out of Doom 3 because...the Captain is pissed....yeah.
None of these characters are likeable and if they had 25 episodes to work with I could see the writers molding them but shit is just happening too fast and it isn't Star Trek. They should have called it something else.
Whoever wrote in that Musk reference should be fired. I think the guy is ok but wtf...
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- Black Barney
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Dwight from The Office doing a guest role looking exactly like Dwight was pretty weak. I was very aware who he was the entire time.
There seems to be a lot of insubordination going on.
How come Starfleet got rid of the Black Alert that they seem to consistently use on this ship? Why are so many of the protocols different? The klingons seem pretty bad at hand-to-hand combat considering they are a warrior race.
I can see why they prefer to film in dark I think. The acting captain last night was some sort of early-gen Cardassian-looking dude and then at the end of the episode, he was in a room with a ton of light and you could clearly see the actor's prosthetics on his face. It was brutal.
Anyway, really terrible. i hope to not watch again. It doesn't even FEEL like Trek.
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I'm guessing the Black Alert goes away with the spore drive because it proves to be a dead end or an ethical problem, but (a) that's part of the prequel problem in general and (b) it's an obvious continuity challenge.
Episode 5 was decent. At least they learned from Into Darkness not to introduce a character the audience knows as if the other characters themselves had already heard of that person. Some of the characters in the episode do work pretty well and are coming around to interesting. I hadn't thought of this until I read a review and thought about it some more, but it's dramatically a mistake to have attributed Saru's hyperaggressive behavior to his concerns about self-doubt when the show has taken pains to show him motivated by guilt over not having adequately protected his captain. How much more effective it would have been if Saru had been driven to some extreme behavior by a desire to make up for his past mistake than to attribute his actions to a general perceived character flaw.
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- Black Barney
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Black Barney wrote: Also i have no idea how to complain about the gay couple brushing their teeth together in their quarters without sounding homophobic. But it certainly felt out of place, forced, and not Trek at all.
I think it's okay to complain about that scene. Trek doesn't normally depict mundane bathroom activities of any sort. That scene would have been just as non-Trek with a heterosexual couple.
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- Black Barney
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but yeah, the family stuff isn't very compelling. We're lucky we didn't get more of Wesley/Beverly than we already did in Next Gen.
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