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× Talk abut Movies & TV here. Just tell us what you have been watching. Have hyper-academic discussions on visual semiotics. Whatever, it's all good.

ST - Discovery

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05 Oct 2017 10:53 #255256 by Shellhead
Replied by Shellhead on topic 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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08 Oct 2017 20:08 - 08 Oct 2017 20:10 #255358 by jpat
Replied by jpat on topic ST - Discovery
I was curious, so I counted: unless I miscounted, there are no fewer than TWENTY people with some sort of "producer" credit on this show (at least for ep. 3). I'm sure that's in part reflective of the development turmoil this show went through, but it's also suggestive that this is going to be an everybody-has-a-hand-in project that doesn't particularly bode well.

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."
Last edit: 08 Oct 2017 20:10 by jpat.
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09 Oct 2017 11:50 - 09 Oct 2017 11:50 #255375 by ThirstyMan
Replied by ThirstyMan on topic ST - Discovery
The good thing, as far as I am concerned, is it is on NETFLIX. Yay.

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
Last edit: 09 Oct 2017 11:50 by ThirstyMan.

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09 Oct 2017 17:00 #255391 by jpat
Replied by jpat on topic ST - Discovery
Fourth ep was, for me, the best one to date. Speaking only generally of it, it felt the most Trek-like and was the first time I sort of liked Michael at all. I guess I'm warming up to the engineer a bit, and the science (?) officer--should bother to learn his name--remains the most interesting and best acted.

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10 Oct 2017 08:09 #255419 by Rafael Silva
Replied by Rafael Silva on topic ST - Discovery
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
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10 Oct 2017 08:30 #255421 by Black Barney
Replied by Black Barney on topic ST - Discovery
Glad I skipped it. I watched some of season 7 of Walking Dead instead

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10 Oct 2017 13:58 #255452 by jpat
Replied by jpat on topic ST - Discovery

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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10 Oct 2017 16:04 #255461 by Joebot
Replied by Joebot on topic ST - Discovery

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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12 Oct 2017 14:55 #255600 by Pat II
Replied by Pat II on topic ST - Discovery
Just watched the fourth episode and they lose me more each episode. The Klingon speach is annoying, each word sounds like a death gasp. The writers obviously read Inner Paths to Outer Space and are aiming for some form of scientific spiritualism with this quantum mycelium Tardigrade and the the Alice in Wonderland references. Why dont they shoot up the Tardigrade with DMT and just bug straight to Kronos and destroy it in a hail of psychedelia.

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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12 Oct 2017 17:09 #255605 by jpat
Replied by jpat on topic ST - Discovery
At a macro level is that what kind of sucks about this show is its very prequel-ness, but that's a product of studio and budget to a large extent. The show was conceived as an anthology set in different time periods. You could put up with certain things, and certain things wouldn't become such an issue "historically," if only one season were set in this time period. Yet the anthology idea is gone, and we're left with prequel-or-nothing. I'd like to believe that if someone had said to Bryan Fuller at the start, "You can do Trek again but no anthology, you gotta pick one period," it wouldn't have been this one.

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16 Oct 2017 16:44 #255805 by Black Barney
Replied by Black Barney on topic ST - Discovery
ok, i made my first serious attempt to watch this last night. I haven't watched Enterprise ever but was it as bad as this?

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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17 Oct 2017 10:01 #255825 by jpat
Replied by jpat on topic ST - Discovery
Not really your question, and possibly an unpopular opinion, but I think this is better than Enterprise, at least first season to first season. Which might not say much about either show, depending. I've been rewatching Enterprise on and off, mostly off, and while I could say that it feels more like Trek, it also feels like (in the first season) so much like the better Trek that preceded it that it might as well not be there. I think there are also more acting deficits in Enterprise than in Discovery. I suppose if one cares about this, and I know some people do, there was a concerted effort in Enterprise to make the ship and the tech look like it could've been a predecessor to the TOS versions, whereas with the new series they've obviously and completely thrown that idea out.

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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17 Oct 2017 10:31 #255828 by Black Barney
Replied by Black Barney on topic ST - Discovery
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.

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17 Oct 2017 10:42 #255830 by Shellhead
Replied by Shellhead on topic ST - Discovery

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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17 Oct 2017 10:46 - 17 Oct 2017 10:47 #255831 by Black Barney
Replied by Black Barney on topic ST - Discovery
like when Keiko and O'Brien would have dinner scenes together in DS9, I didn't care for that either (.....cuz she's Asian).

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.
Last edit: 17 Oct 2017 10:47 by Black Barney.

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