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Spoilers ahoy! Disco, S04E02
kayajay
Member Posts: 1,990 Arc User
in Ten Forward
Disco does make me a little glad that we never got to see Riker and Troi on the Titan, because I just don't think there's a place for the Captain to be that personal with someone on their ship.
There's friendship, a dalliance with a passing alien...but this is icky girlfriend and boyfriend territory.
I don't even know if Book is part of the crew (why his ship is being treated as Starfleet issue and how he's just walking into top level meetings is peculiar), but I do remember being uncomfortable with Picard and the keyboard player. And I loved the actor, but also seriously disliked the character of Cassidy Yates and how she was with Sisko. The dead woman from a hundred years ago in DS9 agreed that she shouldn't have been on the ship.
Now, maybe if Mike had been in the 32nd Century for 20-years more before Discovery arrived and was older, wiser, more seasoned...but she is coming across as a petulant teenage girl.
"I'm the Captain, but I don't need the crew. I can do everything myself. I haven't earned being Captain and I'm really not up to it, but I am, so just shut up."
The next natural step really should have been for an Alien Captain. We've gone Human Male, Human Male, Human Male, Human Female, Human Male...and then into Disco with Human Male, Human Female, Human Female, Alien for 10-seconds and now another Human Female, who I feel is letting the side down.
And we have now also got Book saving the day. "Am I part of the crew? I don't know, but I'll do the job of your officers with my Transformers super ship."
"Oh, so Discovery isn't good enough and we don't have a Delta Flyer-type shuttle or a Runabout that's better? Okay."
I am seriously wondering where all this debris comes from whenever Discovery is hit. We used to get sparks fly on other series, but on Disco, it's puffs of flame and always chunks of black Styrofoam.
It is embarrassing how Saru is running rings around Mike. It's not just imparting wisdom or the sound of reason, he's basically Rod Hull to her Emu.
I've also come to the conclusion that absolutely every episode of this season is going to end with a cataclysmic cliff-hanger. They should only ever be used sparingly, because with a minute left to go, you're now left to expect it and not be impressed by it.
There's friendship, a dalliance with a passing alien...but this is icky girlfriend and boyfriend territory.
I don't even know if Book is part of the crew (why his ship is being treated as Starfleet issue and how he's just walking into top level meetings is peculiar), but I do remember being uncomfortable with Picard and the keyboard player. And I loved the actor, but also seriously disliked the character of Cassidy Yates and how she was with Sisko. The dead woman from a hundred years ago in DS9 agreed that she shouldn't have been on the ship.
Now, maybe if Mike had been in the 32nd Century for 20-years more before Discovery arrived and was older, wiser, more seasoned...but she is coming across as a petulant teenage girl.
"I'm the Captain, but I don't need the crew. I can do everything myself. I haven't earned being Captain and I'm really not up to it, but I am, so just shut up."
The next natural step really should have been for an Alien Captain. We've gone Human Male, Human Male, Human Male, Human Female, Human Male...and then into Disco with Human Male, Human Female, Human Female, Alien for 10-seconds and now another Human Female, who I feel is letting the side down.
And we have now also got Book saving the day. "Am I part of the crew? I don't know, but I'll do the job of your officers with my Transformers super ship."
"Oh, so Discovery isn't good enough and we don't have a Delta Flyer-type shuttle or a Runabout that's better? Okay."
I am seriously wondering where all this debris comes from whenever Discovery is hit. We used to get sparks fly on other series, but on Disco, it's puffs of flame and always chunks of black Styrofoam.
It is embarrassing how Saru is running rings around Mike. It's not just imparting wisdom or the sound of reason, he's basically Rod Hull to her Emu.
I've also come to the conclusion that absolutely every episode of this season is going to end with a cataclysmic cliff-hanger. They should only ever be used sparingly, because with a minute left to go, you're now left to expect it and not be impressed by it.
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Also, is it just me or is Stamets becoming more and more unbearable as seasons go? The "did it just pass through a planetary system?" part when Book is here and it's the whole reason of the mission? Seriously, that's a new low in loud stupidity.
As for the anomaly, I love how the characters act like the major concern is that it's moving randomly and not the fact that, according to the tracking shot at the end, it's UTTERLY MASSIVE! Yes, it's still an horrific concern it erratically advances, but really? This thing could move in just one direction all the time at the speed it moved in the previous episode and it looks like it could destroy about a dozen of entire star systems by the minute!
EDIT: Oh my god, I just saw how bad it has reached with this episode, at 3:52:
"EVERYBODY, BRACE!" *cue nobody trying to hold onto their chair or console*
Granted, Star Trek has always been subject to the trope of "exploding consoles" - but this is just stupid. They have actual fireball producing stations ont he bridge, that do NOTHING but produce fireballs. All the time, in an endless loop. These effects are just bad.
I'd expect they retcon it, as they couldn't possibly spoil the refit for a short-trek released so far in advance.
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The ship had just penetrated the "outer dust cloud", and encountered the rather substantial rocky debris within. Book was griping about the "dust" they'd told him to expect, to which Stamets replied, "It did just pass through a planetary system." (Book replied with a glare that should have disrupted the hologram on its own, as the system involved was Kwejian's.)
The episode does mention the V'draysh, which is how the Federation was nicknamed in an early season 3 episode.
Maybe because I don't have subtitles because I'm not in the US and don't have access to season 4 so I do with what I can and sometimes I don't hear what is said with 100% accuracy.
Also, yeah, being sarcastic to someone who just lost his homeworld using said shattered homeworld as a basis makes it better...
I know people like that in the real world who get so caught up in the mechanics of a problem that they forget just about everything else in the moment, so it probably didn't occur to him that what he was saying would hurt Book, and probably even forgot that it was his home system he was talking about since the information was not relevant to the problem. Sure, it is a thoughtless jerk thing to say, but it is Stammets to a T.
The sarcasm itself was entirely rooted in Stammet's intellectual snobbery and probably just came out automatically.
The portrayal of scientists in general in DSC is rather alarming as none of them are socially normal. There is Stammets with his arrogant snobbery, Tilly who is a brilliant out of the box thinker with absolutely no common sense, and Burnham who has Vulcan-like intelligence and logic (though she rarely seems to actually use it anymore) abilities but essentially a semi-split personality due to the influence of the Katra segment within her.
She might be Spock's adoptive sister, have been raised on Vulcan and always falls back on explaining her behaviour as being "logical"...but it does jar with me personally, when I compare her to Tuvok or even T'Pol (taking into consideration her mental discipline dissolving). If she was a cold fish, she might actually be bearable, but she uses his supposed Vulcanisms as a get-out-jail-free-card.
That was one of the main reasons that Fuller insisted on Sonequa Martin-Green for the part of Burnham, the fact that she is so good with the deeply layered personality flip-flop. Unfortunately, the writers don't write the character like that, or at least not in any kind of convincing way. The actress is perfectly capable of going from emotional and empathetic to a slightly creepy logical cold fish in an instant (or even hovering between the two) if they would have written her that way in the final scripts.
I'd say this character belonged in Lower Decks, but that'd be insulting to Lower Decks because at least in the show, the stupid characters are entertaining enough.
I've not actually seen her in anything else, but based solely on Disco...I'd have to say that I think she's a terrible actor. I'll take anyone's word if they've seen her turn out a great performance in something else, but the character of Mike is utterly unlikable to me, uninteresting, uninspiring and beyond Disco...I'd say that this role is going to be very damaging to her career.
So what you are saying is that its realistic? You look at some of the greatest people to ever live, not just scientists, but artists, musicians, writers, etc., and a large number of them were not "normal" by any measure. Its a fairly common trend among highly intellectual people to have some sort of social issue, or other mental quick like extreme OCD.
Haven't seen her in anything either, but there is nothing a good actor can do about terrible writing.
That is true. A great actor can turn a great performance, even out of a Tribble script.
As for a Tribble actor in a Tribble script though...
The Walking Dead and Discovery (post Fuller anyway) are both outside of her usual type of roles.
I am still struggling with that whole storyline. Is this like Curzon entering Odo in the Trill zhian'tara ritual? The personality is leaving the symbiote, permanently and getting a body of its own? That's not how it's supposed to be done, because that personality and memories belong to the symbiote. It's pretty selfish to take them.
And we had to have the Soji reference, didn't we. In 800-years, there's no better option? I mean, the Doctor gave Danara Pel's actual consciousness a holographic body and we know that Disco loves holograms...but maybe also this programmable matter could have been programmed to create a body?
Still though, with the Trill...it's in their society to change bodies, become new people, a new host, with the symbiote being the catalyst. In the zhian'tara, Ezri brought Juran out and was the only one who could see him (a bit like what's going on I guess), but I'm still uncomfortable with giving a past host its own body.
I'm also uncomfortable with "love" overcoming biology, because in that case, Odan would have been able to stay in Riker and he and Bev would still be going strong!
In the meta however, especially after what one of the writers said: I suspect they don't want to repeat the "Bury your gays" trope criticism from season 1 when they killed Culber off out of nowhere, before bringing him back permanently.
Though if they wanted so, why did they kill the trans man off-screen in the first place, thus robbing him of his body and thus drawing quite some unfortunate implications of having a trans person unable to have their own body?
Also, about the anomaly again. The show says it's 5 light-years wide and it is indeed hugely massive to ridiculous levels.
BUT the ending of Anomaly the episode shows it DWARFING several star systems at once AND the distance between them, so much you have plenty of them in the last second of the shot.
For reference, 5 light-years is slightly bigger than the distance between us and the CLOSEST solar system to ours, Alpha Centauri. For additional reference, Wolf 359, is at about 7.8 light-years from Earth.
So I find it hard to believe that despite already being given a monstrous size, the number is only 5. It feels like it's missing one 0, at the very least.
So either the tracking shot didn't mean to show star clusters, or Starfleet math is way off.
Disco to me doesn't come across as inclusive...it's actually patronizing, because we're getting black characters, TRIBBLE characters, now NB, but none of them are done any justice. It's as if what they are, makes up for how they're written. "Okay, they're there, they've been seen, box checked, job done."
I unfortunately grew up in the era of one of Thatcher's many Tribble-ups...Section 28. It was forbidden for teachers to let students know that TRIBBLE people even existed. They could be sacked over it and truly, the only way I discovered it was from watching the telly!
It's not the same now though and yet, some people get on their high horses and act as if it was. Sexuality isn't a secret...but it doesn't have to be an issue addressed in absolutely everything.
I'd like to watch something, just one thing, without the agenda being so blatant that it's distracting and also takes away from the story.
It's okay for there not to be a TRIBBLE character. It's okay for there not to be a black character. It's okay just to be entertaining, no matter who's on the screen.
And that is truly what Disco misses...writers. It's producers aplenty, but everything about it is forced, manufactured and feels unnatural. The characters don't speak the way real people would, so it jars so terribly to try and take any semblance of a plot seriously.
In Lower Decks, you cannot fault the character development! They're each distinct, flushed-out, interesting...they've done a great job, by actually giving backstories, traits and I feel like Deanna losing my empathy with Disco, because all the characters just feel hollow.
They way they want to take the show...it should have been Mike alone appearing in the future, with just her and Book on his Transformers ship. No Discovery itself, no crew, because she goes through life like it's a one-woman show. There are almost as many characters in Disco as there are producers, but I couldn't tell you anything about them...backstories, hobbies, anything.
Finally, someone remembers that small piece of information.
That is actually fairly typical of the action movie format that DSC uses.
Keeping in mind that Kurtzman has said in a number of interviews that they want to keep DSC in a segmented-movie format, along with that obvious action movie orientation, the closest to the traditional Trek semi-ensemble format they could come would be to do something like the Marvel movie style of rotating solo heroes in arcs of a few segments then pulling back and doing a combined ensemble segment as a kind of season finisher.
The problem (even if they have writers who could handle it) is that the "episodes" themselves are not long enough to cycle like that effectively, and the seasons are too short to do that effectively with doing those rotations by whole episodes or by multiple "episode" arcs.
To stay in action-movie format the way Kurtzman wants they have to stick pretty closely to the action movie conventions, and one of the primary conventions of the genre is that there is the main hero who stands out, like Ethan Hunt, John McClane, Lara Croft, etc. The old black and white space operas that DSC has its roots in were the same way, one main hero like Buck Rodgers, Flash Gordon, Commando Cody, etc. who were the major focus and everyone else was just supporting cast.
Neo-Luddites are anyone who rejects modern technology (or science in some cases) and would prefer a return to a "simpler time" (that is almost always not as pleasant as they think it would be, but that is beside the point). Owo was probably born into an anti-tech agrarian society like a number of the colonies shown in TNG. It could have been interesting if they would have played upon an inner conflict where she is the progressive rebel who secretly feels a kind of guilt for embracing the "dark side" according to her culture's beliefs.
You know, if Disco was released as say four or five tv-movies a "season" and got to do their film-esque thing all in one, then maybe it would work. It doesn't work as an Eastenders format. Episodic self-contained stories are what works in an hour long show, but that's not enough for Disco...it wants more and that strain does show.
If each episode was like an Inspector Morse, Prime Suspect or Columbo, then...
If anything, recent trends have shown that episodic TV is dead outside of crime shows like CSI, or animated comedy shows like Family Guy. If someone is going to sit down in front of a TV for an hour to watch something they want it to be part of a larger narrative, not a fire and forget one off. That sort of TV format was dying even when Enterprise started airing back in 2001, which is part of the reason why ENT's first two seasons were so hated. ENT got better in S3 and S4 when they went into a more serialized format since that is what people wanted.
I must not be like most people then...because they certainly don't hit my g-spot :-/
Don't get too hung up in definitions and sweeping statements by fans of particular internet myths. Episodic TV is not dead, the fashion wheel has just rolled around to where Hollywood is making a lot more serials than they used to in order to try and attract more binge watchers and capitalize on the "here fishy, fishy" effect of breaking off a story without resolution each segment.
And to make sure everyone is on the same page terminology wise, what would be called an "episode" in a series is called a "segment" in a serial, though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably in a sloppy way (I do that myself all too often for instance).
Back in late 1950s and early 1960s it was said that "serials are dead" and that the only thing they were good for was soap operas (and possibly children's shows), and today the same thing is being said of episodes. It was not true of serials then and it is not true of episodes now, it just made production easier at the time and allowed the networks more control over how a show was shown so that is what Hollywood told the viewers.
It's a Hollywood fashion cycle not much different from clothing fashion cycles except for being a lot slower to make the circle since it has to do with production and distribution networks which do not change as fast as the seasons that partially drive clothing fashion.
I don't know about the MCU streaming TV shows since I don't have Disney+, but the MCU movies are a good example of episodic arcs. Each movie is a standalone story in itself, but the movies all connect with each other in an arc using a sort of star-of-stars or converging-tree hierarchy topology.
The crux of it whether a whole story is told each time or not, that is what the real difference is between a serial (incomplete and dependent upon the rest of the segments for its completion) and an episodic format (complete short story that may or may not have a metaplot arc connecting it with other episodes). And the truth is, very few shows are purely one or the other and all of them usually have at least a few elements of each.