Pilot

Discovery
User avatar
T'Pau
Lieutenant Commander
Lieutenant Commander
Posts: 1117
Joined: Thu May 14, 2009 7:24 pm
Location: New York City, NY USA

Re: Pilot

Post by T'Pau »

Ah, Ian just reminded me of something I did like: Saru, the science officer. Each ear has a small frill that expanded when things got intense, and he made a slight tongue clucking sound as well, but that could have been due to the heavy handed makeup. His hyponasal-ness due to lack of airway, was distracting.

As to the bridge officer headed towards sickbay and missed via the brig: he *did* have a significant head injury, so I gave that bit a pass.

Morbid curiosity might have me watching to see the *actual* titular ship appear, and see if any other interesting crew members make an appearance as well.
"This is the Vulcan heart. This is the Vulcan soul. This is our way."
User avatar
Tinadrin Chelnor
Lieutenant Commander
Lieutenant Commander
Posts: 921
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2010 3:11 am
Location: Pendroca IV

Re: Pilot

Post by Tinadrin Chelnor »

I just watched it last night on Netflix. To say disappointed is an understatement. I hated the Klingons, their ships, everything about them. I liked the science officer, and the USS Shenzou. I'll watch the next episode, but I don't hold out much hope of liking it. Oh, and I hated the intro. I wish they had made a post-Voyager series instead, set in the 25th century.
"No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power, governments and tyrants and armies cannot stand."
User avatar
Graham Kennedy
Site Admin
Site Admin
Posts: 11561
Joined: Mon Jul 09, 2007 2:28 pm
Location: Banbury, UK
Contact:

Re: Pilot

Post by Graham Kennedy »

Here's my review of the first episode.

Ian and I are debating how DITL will handle Discovery. I'm leaning towards minimal involvement - maybe just episode reviews, maybe nothing at all. So some version of this may make it to the site, or not. So I figured I would post it here first.


So, here we go.

We open with an arty visual effects sequence which zooms out and out until it becomes the eye of an alien. One might take this as an indication that Discovery will be a show that puts a lot of effort into visuals. One would be right.

The alien is T'Kuvma, a Klingon. Only… it's not a Klingon. It looks nothing like a Klingon, not remotely. Apparently, according to the producers, T'Kuvma and his people are some long separate offshoot of the Klingon species, and that's why they look different. This makes no sense to me - Amish people don't have tentacles, right?

As well as looking different, these Klingons look bad. They're visually busy. It's like whoever designed them though that there needs to be as much detail as possible on them, their clothing, their weapons, their ships... It looks impressive, but in a ridiculous, silly, impractical way. My reaction is less "wow, this is amazing!" and more "wow, I can't believe they spent that much effort and produced something that silly!"

T'Kuvma is convinced that the Federation is coming to destroy the Klingons. "They will coil around us," he says, "and take all that we are."

Why does he believe this? We're never told. He just does. As seen in Enterprise, the Humans had a decent first contact with the Klingons. After that they had their run-ins, but they were as often good as bad. One could not really call the two species 'enemies' at that point. And, we learn, the Klingons vanished into isolation just after Enterprise finished, and there has been little contact with them since. So why hostility? Apparently it's just because Humans are peaceful and Klingons don't like that. Okay...

He also believes that the '24 warring houses' must reunite in order to combat this threat. It's worth mentioning at this point that these 'Klingons' have huge, prominent teeth - worth mentioning because that means that every single Klingon actor has to kind of mumble their lines around their dentures, which makes it sound like they can't talk properly. Remember Worf? What a voice Michael Dorn has! Deep and booming and serious. Or how about that smooth but slightly creepy voice that Gowron had? Now imagine them slurring and mumbling their way through their lines. That's what the Discovery 'Klingons' do, on every single line.

So, plot point one : T'Kuvma wants war with the Federation as a reason for the Klingon race to unite.

Next we cut to Captain Philippa Georgiou and her first officer, Michael Burnham, walking through a desert. A storm is approaching, and Georgiou asks Burnham how long it will take to arrive. "One hour, seventeen minutes, twenty two seconds," Burnham says confidently.

What the writers are obviously doing here is trying to give Burnham a "Vulcan" moment. We will learn later on that she was raised on Vulcan by Vulcans, and so they are trying to show that influence. But as a human, why would Burnham even have the mental capacity to make such calculations? I was always under the impression that Vulcans could do what they could do partly because of training, but also because they are basically intellectual giants compared to humans, at least when it came to matters of fact, to mathematics, etc. But according to Discovery… apparently not. These things are simply a matter of training.

There's also the question of how can you possibly give a to-the-second estimate of when a storm will hit anyway, no matter how smart you are. There isn't even such a thing as the moment a storm hits, storms are analogue, not digital! They arrive gradually!

Anyway. Onward! Next we learn their mission. A species on this planet is on the verge of extinction... because "the ambient radiation from a nearby meteor drilling accident dried out their water table."

Um.... what? What on earth is that even supposed to mean? I presume by "meteor drilling" they mean that there was some sort of asteroid mine in space, near the planet. And an accident released radiation, which… got to the planet, somehow? And that… caused their water to dry up? Radiation can do many things. But it's not really a desiccant. I have tried to come up with some kind of mental picture of what she's talking about, and I just cannot.

"If we can get in and out without making contact," Burnham adds, "we can steer clear of General Order One."

General Order One is, in Trek lore, better known as The Prime Directive. It forbids interference with natural development of alien cultures, essentially. Now what exactly that means is a long and complex subject, but Burnham has been nice enough to specifically laid out their intention here - avoiding contact. And how does she plan to do that? Well… they're going to walk through the middle of the alien's territory, right through their breeding grounds, right under all their eggs, walk right up to their well community well, and shoot a phaser rifle down it.

Brilliant. How could you possibly fault a plan like this! As they walk through the eggs, an alien crawls past above. If it had looked down at them, that would have been a mission fail. But it didn't, so that's okay.

So they arrive at the well, shoot through the bedrock, and there's water down there and it all bubbles up. Mission accomplished.

They set off back to their beam out point. But the storm arrives early. I'm sorry to have to say it, but this kind of makes Burnham look like an idiot. I guess that absurdly super precise estimate of the storm's arrival was a case of her mouth writing cheques her brain couldn't cash. So the impression we have now is that Burnham is indeed what I suggested… somebody with a Vulcan habit of expressing themselves, but without the intellectual capacity to back it up. This is not promising beginning for the character.

Now they hit a problem. With the storm arrived, their ship can't detect them. Nor will their communicators work through the storm. Huh? This is, so far as we know, a perfectly normal storm. Since when do communicators and transporters not work through a storm?

So the Captain leads Burnham on a trek (ha!) through the desert, and their footprints leave a big delta symbol into the ground. Now in this time period, the delta symbol they've stuck all over the place in this show was the logo of the USS Enterprise. And that's all it was. So it is a mystery to me why the Captain makes it in the sand. Maybe she wishes she Captained the Enterprise? Right now Captain Pike is in command of the Enterprise. Majel Barrett's 'Number One' is his first officer, and Spock is his science officer. I know I'd rather be seeing what that ship and crew are up to instead of this one.

It's a small thing, sticking the Enterprise delta all over the Discovery, but it's rather symbolic. I'm willing to bet that it happened because those who made Discovery said something like "People know that symbol means 'Star Trek', so we have to have it on the show whether it makes sense for it to be there or not." And these are people who would then go on to make many claims about how closely they are 'sticking to established canon'.

That's the generous version, though. If it wasn't that, then my second bet would be that it never occurred to them not to use the symbol because they didn't have any idea that it was only associated with the Enterprise at this point.

Anyway, although the storm has arrived and the sand is being blown all over the place, the Enterprise symbol doesn't get blown away. And although there is cloud cover and the ship's sensors aren't working through the storm, it sees the mark anyway and comes diving through the clouds to beam them up. And that's obviously what this entire desert scene has been about. I'd bet good money that somebody had a thought that it would be a cool visual to have the ship swoop out of the clouds like that, and every single thing in this scene was written to get to that point, regardless of the plot logic. I wonder if somebody thought to ask "Why wouldn't they just send a shuttle?" If so, I bet they threw things at him for saying it.

I will note, and not for the last time, that "Starship comes out of clouds" is a very common visual in the JJ Abrams version of Star Trek. It featured in both of his Trek movies. But Discovery can't be heavily influenced by Jaybrams Trek, right? I mean, it's set in the Prime universe. They keep saying so in interviews.

So all we've had is the teaser, and already every single thing that has been said and done is utterly nonsensical, wrong, and completely lacking in logic.

Get used to that.


After the Westworld-inspired opening, we get a shot of Discovery in warp flight. They have taken the usual "streaking stars" effect and ramped it up to 11. Then ramped that up to 11 again. As with much of what we will see on Discovery it looks both expensive, and weird, and very overdone. Burnham's log states that it is Sunday May 11th, 2256 - Stardate 1207.3. Yes, the 11th of May 2256 is indeed going to be a Sunday. Score one for the writers.

The ship has been sent to investigate a comm relay which has been damaged. They aren't sure if it was hit by weapons or an asteroid. I would have thought those two things would be extremely different, but what do I know. Burnham makes some comment about how the beauty of space makes her optimistic. It's a nice line… but it's really not delivered very well. In fact, as things progress we will see that neither one of the main characters turns in a very good performance. I'll give Sonequa Martin-Green the benefit of the doubt and assume it's because the show she's on was known for having a rather troubled production. Her character is poorly written, who knows what kind of direction she got… I can see why she's bad.

Michelle Yeoh is bad, but… honestly I've never seen a good performance from her. She seems to have a fan base who think she's a good actress, but for the life of me I can't work out why.

We meet Saru, the science officer. His species see everything as a threat, we are told. He thinks the relay was hit on purpose. Burnham suggests that this was to get the attention of a Starfleet ship. Around this time you start to notice that Discovery is one of those shows that thinks it's cool to constantly tilt the camera over. You know, like… um… the Adam West Batman series. And Battlefield Earth. Remember Battlefield Earth? Wasn't that just a cinematic gem worthy of emulation?

Ahem.

We also get some banter between the officers on the bridge. And wow. It's obviously meant to be the kind of stuff TOS did all the time, but it really comes across as kind of forced and awkward. Maybe that's the bad acting at work, maybe it's just that the dialogue isn't great again, maybe it's just that we don't know these people well, but it all just feels very strained.

Saru detects something, but is unable to resolve it. Burnham then literally shoves him out of the way to have a go herself. He then shoves her out of the way to get back to it.

Um… what? Banter is one thing, but can you imagine, say, Sulu shoving Spock out of the way of anything? Or Data shoving Riker out of the way? It's just super-weird and comes across as really, really unprofessional. Especially given that, presumably, either one could have gone to any console on the bridge and called the data up.

There's some sort of stealth effect around whatever it is, so they can't tell much about it. They go and look through a good old fashioned telescope pointed out a window, which can. Huh? A common sensor carried by ships today is an EOD - an Electro-Optical Device. What's that? It's basically a digital camera with a huge zoom lens. Discovery would pretty much have to have something like this to be able to have visual displays at all… why wouldn't they work? A digital camera pretty much does what your eye does, anything that interfered with it would likely interfere with your retina just as much.

But again, you can just hear the writers. "Hey, what if there was this like sensor weird thing, and they had to use somebody's antique telescope! That would be a cool visual!"

So since shuttles aren't agile enough to move through the ring of rocks the thing is hidden in, Burnham says she will fly out in a thruster suit. Saru objects, saying the radiation will shred her DNA inside 20 minutes. Burnham promises to do a simple flyby and be back in 19. Captain Georgiou agrees, and tells Saru to go with her. Makes sense, never send one person alone is a good safety rule. But both officers object, so Burnham goes alone.

Now, this is a small point, but it stuck out to me. How is it that the First Officer can apparently overrule the Captain on this? Okay, maybe that's overly harsh. She doesn't over-rule her… but she does change her mind. It just seems… odd. Again, imagine this scene :

Riker : "I volunteer Captain."
Picard : "Very well. But take Worf with you."
Riker : "But I don't want to."
Worf : "And I don't want to go."
Picard : "Okay then, go alone Commander Riker."

It just feels weird and off, doesn't it? You can't quite picture Starfleet officers acting that way.

So Burnham goes out in a thruster suit, in a scene that is obviously influenced by Spock's flight through V'Ger in Star Trek : The Motion Picture, but very much more so by Star Trek : Into Darkness. Another Jaybrams influence. Yay. But it's not set in the Kelvin timeline! No it is not! And if you think otherwise, then you're just a big poopy head!

Now remember that Burnham very clearly said that she would just do a flyby. However, it turns out that she was lying about that. So once there she lands on the thing and has a walk around. Its a ship, a Klingon ship. She doesn't recognize it, which is at least understandable, because it looks absolutely nothing like a Klingon ship. It's full of Klingons that look nothing like Klingons, too. It's ridiculous and wrong, but at least there is symmetry.

A Klingon shows up wearing an absurdly over-designed space suit. I'm sorry, but these Klingon designs really are verging on comical at this point. You remember in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, when the Vogon ships were over Earth and the camera did jump pull-backs in time to the music? But then it just kept doing it and doing it and doing it, to the point where it was so absurd that it was funny? That's what these Klingon designs are like. It's like the designer sketched a design… then made designs to go on bits of that design… then made more designs to go on bits of that design… then made even more designs to go on bits of that design… until the whole thing is just so ridiculously overdone that you're left laughing at it.

So the Klingon attacks Burnham, and she accidentally kills him and escapes. What an impressively competent officer this woman is.

Back to T'Kuvma, who is putting his friend's body in a coffin. This is stuck to the hull of the ship. We will learn that that's what this ship is - it's a kind of holy temple which houses thousands of coffins on the hull. They act like armour of a sort, too. Funky. We see a Klingon funeral, then, complete with the death howl from TNG. Unlike TNG, they revere their dead rather than regarding it as "just a shell" to be disposed of. But different houses have different rituals, so fair enough.

Then we flash to Burnham as a kid on Vulcan. We learn that her parents were killed in a Klingon raid, which she is upset about. She hates Klingons because of this.

She's rescued, suffering from bad radiation burns since, you know, she disobeyed orders and stayed out there too long. She then disobeys orders again, running out of medical and charging up to the bridge.

You know, this is going to be the main protagonist of the series. And so far, every single action we have seen her take as been unprofessional, disobedient to the point of mutinous, or just plain dumb. Are we supposed to be liking Michael Burnham? Are we supposed to admire her? Because so far, at least… I don't, and I don't see why anybody would or how anybody could.

So she warns Georgiou about the Klingons. The Captain is a bit dubious, but declares a red alert. The Klingon ship decloaks.

Yes, you read that right. Up until STIII, we never saw Klingons with a cloaking device. It's been widely assumed that when Romulans started using Klingon designs in The Enterprise Incident, they had traded cloaking technology for those ships. But I guess not. Oops, there's another bit of Star Trek thrown out the window. Oh well, plenty more where that came from.

So the Klingon ship decloaks. On board, T'Kuvma laments the death of their "torch bearer" and they discuss appointing another. They choose Voq, an albino Klingon. Normally there is a lot of animosity towards albinos, but he makes an impassioned speech about how committed he is, and to prove it he sticks his hand in a fire and leaves it there for a while. T'Kuvma approves, and Voq gets the job. If you have trouble with job interviews, now you know what to do in the next one.

Back on Shenzhou, Burnham walks in on a conversation between Captain Georgiou and an Admiral. The Admiral doesn't seem too impressed with Burnham's actions so far, which is perfectly understandable; I'm liking him already. Burnham argues that the Klingons are hostile by nature, and the Admiral chides her - they have had only fleeting contact with the Klingons for the last century, how could she presume to know their nature? It's a fair point. He orders Georgiou to hold position and do nothing unless provoked - every Starfleet ship within range is on the way and a fleet will be there in two hours. Again, reasonable.

Burnham explains that Saru thinks they should just run away. His species are descended from a prey animal - in fact on his planet there are no such things as food chains, in which any given animal might be a predator to one species and prey to another. Rather, every animal is one or the other - predator or prey. I'm not sure how that could work, really. One assumes there is a wide variation of size amongst the different species, as there is on Earth, right? And so there are going to be predators that, whilst large and dangerous to some prey animals, are small and tasty-treat-looking to other, larger predators, right? So why wouldn't their equivalent of a cougar try to eat their equivalent of a cat?

Anyway, the upshot of this is that as a "prey" species, Saru's species are basically cowards. So he pretty much always wants to be cautious, and always wants to run away. Shades of Larry Niven's Puppeteers here, to be sure. Georgiou points out that with nearby Federation colonies and facilities, they can't just leave a threat to do what it likes. Again, fair point. Besides, you've been ordered to do nothing and wait, so it's really not relevant what Saru wants to do.

Suddenly the Klingon ship lights up super-bright, blinding the bridge crew. It blinds them because their bridge has a huge window, another feature imported from the Jaybrams-verse which this show is not supposed to be part of. Even with the filters on maximum the light is painfully bright. You know, it's kind of impressive to see a show that chose to have a big window on the bridge then go out of the way to demonstrate why that's a really bad idea.

Of course, they could simply tilt the ship a little, so that the forward bulk of the saucer was between the bridge and the Klingon ship. That would shade them from the light, no matter how bright it was. But nobody seems to think of that.

An officer states that the brightness is 1 billion Lux. He actually says one billion lumens per square metre, but a lumen per square metre is what a Lux is. A billion of them is about ten thousand times brighter than the brightest direct sunlight, which is impressive.

There's then a huge noise, which we are told is some kind of "electromagnetic subspace waveform". Essentially, what this is is a beacon designed to signal the other Klingon houses to come see what's going on.

Burnham leaves the bridge and contacts Sarek. We discover that the Klingons killed her parents, which explains why she has a grump on about them. The Klingon Empire has been in disarray for generations, Sarek says. Perhaps a new leader has emerged to unify them. Burnham assumes that this hypothetical leader wants a war to unify the Empire, and Sarek cautions her about letting her past drive her assumptions. She asks how the Vulcans have been able to coexist with the Klingons, and he says the solution is particular to the Vulcans, and may not work for a human ship. But the method turns out to be that the Vulcans began to fire on any Klingon ship they met, thus showing strength and earning respect. Why would Sarek assume that this might not work for humans? Who knows. Burnham certainly seems to assume it would.

She goes out to convince Georgiou that what is needed right now is "A Vulcan Hello" (title drop!). Georgiou refuses, on the basis that "Starfleet doesn't fire first". There's also the fact that they've been ordered not to act unless provoked, but nobody seems to consider that a factor. Burnham makes a snotty comment about how logic should compel Georgiou to consider her success rate over the last seven years and therefore implement her plan without further argument. It really comes across as rather arrogant. When Burnham argues, Georgiou takes the argument to her ready room.

They argue the point there for a bit, neither really backing down much. Burnham stresses that firing is the only way to prevent loss of life… Georgiou's life, specifically. It seems a little odd. Why would she assume that Georgiou would necessarily be one to die in a conflict with the Klingons? Hmmm. Burnham then apologises and says Georgiou is right… only to neck pinch her.

It's long been a topic of debate amongst Trek fans as to whether the neck pinch is a species capability or just a martial arts move. Some think that the pinch is a form of telepathy - Vulcans touch the face to mind meld, goes the argument, because as touch telepaths they usually need contact for their telepathy to work. Touching the neck is a variation on this, essentially a telepathic blast that knocks a person out. Others argue that it's literally a nerve pinch, hitting just the right nerves to knock a person out. if the latter, then any trained person could do it. The argument was resolved when Data neck-pinched Sela in Unification, Part 2 - if Data can do it, surely any sufficiently trained person can.

So it makes sense that Burnham can do this. She goes out onto the bridge and tells the crew the Captain has changed her mind, and orders the weapons readied for firing. We know this is a tense moment, because the camera swoops around the bridge constantly, tilting all over the place as if the camera operator is having some kind of seizure.

As the crew respond, albeit dubiously, Georgiou emerges from her ready room with a phaser and tells Burnham to stand down.

You know, when I suggested that her failed attempt to predict the storm accurately indicated that Burnham had Vulcan mannerisms whilst lacking the capability to actually do them properly, I thought maybe I was being a little harsh. Yet here we are again… Burnham can do a Vulcan neck pinch, but her version of it incapacitates a person for… what, twenty seconds, maximum? They really do seem to want to sell Burnham as an incompetent Vulcan.

Anyway, Burnham yet again argues against Georgiou. "I'm trying to save you," she insists. Again, it's like she is doing this not because she thinks it's the best solution, but because she thinks it will save Georgiou specifically. It's an odd moment… until you realise that the writer is, in a rather ham-fisted way, trying to establish that Burnham is super protective of Georgiou, specifically. This will become important later.

At that point the beacon switches off and a bunch of "Klingon" ships arrive. Like the sarcophagus ship, none of these look anything like any Klingon ship ever. And like the sarcophagus ship, they are all comically over-designed.

They also warp in with the "instantaneous deceleration" effect from the Jaybrams verse. Because this series definitely isn't set in that universe, but in the Prime one. That's why they constantly throw similarities in our face. To establish that it's different.

And that's episode one of Discovery.
Give a man a fire, and you keep him warm for a day. SET a man on fire, and you will keep him warm for the rest of his life...
DonP
Senior chief petty officer
Senior chief petty officer
Posts: 68
Joined: Sun May 21, 2017 3:23 am

Re: Pilot

Post by DonP »

Yeah, I'd definitely call that both accurate and fair. I'd add two small points. Concerning the Klingon cloak, we mustn't forget that ten years later, our heroine's brother will describe cloaking devices as "theoretically possible". As to the neck pinch, we saw that Spock in McCoy's body was unable to perform it, indicating that it probably requires above human average strength. So I guess score one for her that she can do it at all.
DarkMoineau
Lieutenant
Lieutenant
Posts: 407
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:03 am

Re: Pilot

Post by DarkMoineau »

Well, all the problems seen in trailers are in the show of course (aesthetics changes if Discovery took place after Voyager would have not created as much bad reaction), but I don't see that pilot as terrible as some says.... Into Darkness, Kirk meet God and Star Wars 7 are weaker stories in my opinion.

To me it almost seems that Star Trek Discovery bashing is mainstream beyond reason. I hope to be right at the end of the season as I really want to get new Star Trek Stories, ships and characters each years just like the lucky fellow who where old enough (and lucky enough to be in a country that respect Science Fiction -> Not France) to live the great decades from 1987 to 2005.

Oh and cloaking devices were already in Star Trek Enterprise, thanks to the Sulibans. So if respecting Spock words would be better, the continuity error is not new but 16 years old.....
If you want to ask me, this avatar is a resized version of "The War Come Home" by Davemetlesits found on DeviantArt
User avatar
Reliant121
3 Star Admiral
3 Star Admiral
Posts: 12263
Joined: Thu Jul 26, 2007 5:00 pm

Re: Pilot

Post by Reliant121 »

You know, cavernous plot holes aside, I didn't mind it. I sadly suspect the place for old style cerebral Star Trek is virtually gone. I'll watch for lack of anything else to watch but it's merely...passable.

That being said, The Expanse is a real showcase on a modern sci-fi done right.
User avatar
Nutso
2 Star Admiral
2 Star Admiral
Posts: 9614
Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2008 9:58 pm

Re: Pilot

Post by Nutso »

Speaking of The Expanse, every prisoner on the Prison shuttle has been on The Expanse. Anyway, I think with the third episode, the show's pilot is finally concluded. We've been introduced to the main characters.

The interesting thing is how many people hate Michael Burnham. So this show almost immediately throws out Gene Roddenberry's no conflicts between The Federation officers. Then there's those prisoners who really aren't about seeking to better themselves, like humans would say in Picard's time. So this universe is a bit more grim than the old universe so far. Not sure how I feel about that. It's interesting when it comes to storytelling but, it takes some getting used to.
"Bible, Wrath of Khan, what's the difference?"
Stan - South Park
DarkMoineau
Lieutenant
Lieutenant
Posts: 407
Joined: Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:03 am

Re: Pilot

Post by DarkMoineau »

Nutso wrote:Speaking of The Expanse, every prisoner on the Prison shuttle has been on The Expanse. Anyway, I think with the third episode, the show's pilot is finally concluded. We've been introduced to the main characters.

The interesting thing is how many people hate Michael Burnham. So this show almost immediately throws out Gene Roddenberry's no conflicts between The Federation officers. Then there's those prisoners who really aren't about seeking to better themselves, like humans would say in Picard's time. So this universe is a bit more grim than the old universe so far. Not sure how I feel about that. It's interesting when it comes to storytelling but, it takes some getting used to.
I remember to have heard or read Discovery was supposed to show Mankind's evolution at an intermediate point betweeen Enterprise and TOS.... The issue is having it just 10 years before TOS, 20 or 30 years would make more sense or at least that's my feeling.

BUT in TOS Spock was the victim of racist remarks once the true face of Romulan was knew, Kirk clearly had to sermonize the crewmember about his bigotry... so conflict between Federation officers, even if smaller, already existed at the time of TOS.
If you want to ask me, this avatar is a resized version of "The War Come Home" by Davemetlesits found on DeviantArt
User avatar
Nutso
2 Star Admiral
2 Star Admiral
Posts: 9614
Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2008 9:58 pm

Re: Pilot

Post by Nutso »

DarkMoineau wrote:
Nutso wrote:Speaking of The Expanse, every prisoner on the Prison shuttle has been on The Expanse. Anyway, I think with the third episode, the show's pilot is finally concluded. We've been introduced to the main characters.

The interesting thing is how many people hate Michael Burnham. So this show almost immediately throws out Gene Roddenberry's no conflicts between The Federation officers. Then there's those prisoners who really aren't about seeking to better themselves, like humans would say in Picard's time. So this universe is a bit more grim than the old universe so far. Not sure how I feel about that. It's interesting when it comes to storytelling but, it takes some getting used to.
I remember to have heard or read Discovery was supposed to show Mankind's evolution at an intermediate point betweeen Enterprise and TOS.... The issue is having it just 10 years before TOS, 20 or 30 years would make more sense or at least that's my feeling.

BUT in TOS Spock was the victim of racist remarks once the true face of Romulan was knew, Kirk clearly had to sermonize the crewmember about his bigotry... so conflict between Federation officers, even if smaller, already existed at the time of TOS.
Certainly. That was always the one I brought up when my friend would bring up the Roddenberry "no conflict" stuff regarding TNG. There was an officer judging Spock for looking like an enemy of the Federation. But this was our modern day prison behavior. They were going to shank Michael, in front of Federation officers, where only one officer reacted to protect her before his boss called him off. CBS wasn't kidding about the series being gritty. I laughed at that earlier in the year but, it's not too overbearing. It's just a new world to discover.
"Bible, Wrath of Khan, what's the difference?"
Stan - South Park
Post Reply