Suffering Through TNG: It's time for your oral exam, Wesley!

[nacho]

Okay. Watching Star Trek Discovery. I was thinking about liveblogging...but... When I think about this show, my reaction is:

[RottingCorpse]

The internet is raving over it...

[nacho]

The internet is raving over it...

So... It's difficult because I equally want to love it and forgive it for all its faults and hate it.

Sonequa Green holds the whole damn thing together. Without her, it would be dead. Everyone else is trying too hard. The writing is ponderous and eye-rolling. But it looks pretty, and it's clearly ready to launch in a different direction than anything else in the trek universe.

Though the problem is that I saw so many callbacks, it was almost distracting. We have the spiritual journey of the Klingons from DS9/VOY. We have Spock losing his mom from the 2009 reboot (lots of nu-Trek in it, really). And we even call back to Tom Paris in VOY a bit. In fact, the premise for the season is essentially looks to be a darker version of Paris' journey in VOY.

It's very hard to judge it, though. The pilot episode sets up a crew and a ship and then destroys them at the end and completely resets the stage. So there's no way to know what's going to happen now.

But...it's not worth paying for it. 

[RottingCorpse]

The "better than expected but not worth paying for" refrain is being repeated a lot on my FB feed today.

[RottingCorpse]

[nacho]

I appreciate the Dr. Crusher love there.

[RottingCorpse]

I'm dying to watch the ghost fucking episode.

[nacho]

I'm dying to watch the ghost fucking episode.

Watch it now while it's streaming everywhere before CBS fucks us. Anything that puts Crusher in a nightgown for half an episode is aces in my book.

[RottingCorpse]

Sarek is in Discovery? Are you still watching, Nacho?

[nacho]

Sarek is in Discovery? Are you still watching, Nacho?

Yes, James Frain plays Sarek this time. The main star is his "ward" and he makes random appearances because there's a part of him in her from a long-ago mind meld and...

 

Oh! Sorry. So...episode three finally gets her to the Discovery. The Discovery is on a top secret mission (it's very obviously run by Section 31, though they aren't yet pointed out in this series). The mission is to create an improbability drive a'la Hitchhikers Guide, which goes wrong Interstellar/Event Horizon style in their sister ship and may well go wrong in their ship.

It's okay so far. They're rumored to be spending $8 million an episode which looks like it could be true. But the problem here is that it wants to be talky emotional exploration old-Trek but it's surrounded by whiz-bang, boom, shoot-em-up nu-Trek.

[nacho]

io9, however, is very happy...and largely just for one reason:

During the journey, Stamets tells Burnham that he and his dead friend were happy in a lab, doing amazing research. Then the war started, their research was co-opted, they were separated so that they’d be “twice as fast” in their work, and Stamets had to work for the “warmonger” Lorca. And this? This is the idea I have been waiting for Star Trek to explore forever. Even Deep Space Nine, which also featured a war that tested the limits of Starfleet and the Federation, never delved that much into the fundamental tension of Starfleet’s stated mission of exploration and its military side.

I wanted Star Trek: Into Darkness to go into this. I wanted the Kelvin timeline to show how the Kelvin incident would give the hawks in Starfleet a chance to mold the institution into something less science-focused and more defense-focused. I wanted that conflict—and the hawks winning more than they did at the same time in the Prime timeline—to make having two timelines actually mean something more than “we don’t have to worry about continuity.” Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Discovery actually seems to be looking at this. Rapp plays Stamets as both in love with the science, and furious about how he’s being forced to research it. It’s a perfect Star Trek conflict, and I am here for it.

I kind of agree with this. DS9 didn't address the hawks at all. It was a war of survival. And, yes, nu-Trek is hopeless in the face of this. Discovery is positioning itself to question the fundamental aspects of exploration and science vs. war and Star Trek captain psychosis syndrome.

[nacho]

So, yes. Back to Discovery. It's the prequel factor that bothers me the most. This could easily have been set post-Voyager. It would have also given them more freedom to explore what is, potentially, something interesting and engaging...

But I guess the studio always gets what it wants, right?

[RottingCorpse]

Yeah, a prequel seems misguided, though I suppose they like the structure of building towards known entities.

[nacho]

Yeah, a prequel seems misguided, though I suppose they like the structure of building towards known entities.

Except that's not what they're doing. Their stated backstory in the buildup to the release is actually all wrong. Michael is not Number One from The Cage. The Klingon story is not at all canon and has no bearing on what's to come. It, in fact, completely retcons Enterprise and TOS. The technology is more advanced than the TNG-era.

So the only use of the prequel aspect is to make us think we're building to known entities -- and we get dumb teases here and there, like with Sarek. But it's all surface only. There's no point to having Michael be Spock's sister, and Sarek only exists (so far) to say "Hi, I'm Sarek from the original show!" every once in a while.

Also, poor Rekha Sharma. She's doomed to always be a strong, awesome person of color in modern sci-fi reboots only to die horribly, needlessly, and illogically in terms of scripting and characterization. Ah, well. At least they can't kill the black girl this time around. I'm sure they're trying to figure out a way around that, though.

[nacho]

Discovery update:

With the Harry Mudd episode we slip up quite a bit.

First, Pike is among the "most decorated captains ever" list. This list includes Robert April (the first (current?) commander of the Enterprise), Archer (of course), the captain who died in the pilot of this show (whom we know nothing about, who was in charge of a minor vessel, and who LOST that vessel), Decker's dad, and then Pike.

So, if we're going with the increasingly tenuous "ten years before The Cage" idea, then Pike hasn't even begun his five year mission yet. He's a relatively new captain as of this show's timeline.

Fan service like this is just annoying at this point.

Rainn Wilson as Mudd is great, of course. But I continue to wonder -- did we really need Mudd? This is, again, part of the "why do a prequel?" question. It's totally unnecessary. Not only would you have the same viewership if this were post-Voyager, it would be a better show all around. Why are the studios so afraid of new ideas?

Mudd's anti-Starfleet rhetoric is also from a darker time in the future. It's exactly what you would hear in later seasons of TNG, DS9, and VOY. Again, perfectly fine if we weren't in the utopian world of pre-TOS. With the timeframe in mind, and knowing Mudd's future, it's odd to hear this on-point criticism of Starfleet. I feel like, if Kirk & Co. had heard this argument, they'd just be flummoxed and it would result in a Shatner monologue.

Use of the word "fucking." After 50 years of Star Trek, it was actually alarming for a character to casually say "This is fucking cool!"

Leaving Mudd behind: This was just stupid, since we know his character arc. It made it feel like Mudd, who was pretty much just a minor guest star, was one big fan service moment. That is, entirely pointless. More to the point of the utopian pre-TOS setting -- it's shocking that they leave Mudd behind. That's something no other captain on the show would have done, with the exception of Sisko, and Sisko would have struggled mightily and gotten an epilogue to emotionally address this decision. It's not even "dark sci-fi" to have this choice be an option. Lorca leaves Mudd behind happily and never thinks twice about it. This essentially moves Lorca into "villain" territory, which is something the show seems to kinda sorta want to do. But it's just so dumb and over the top.

Of course, Lorca also confesses to murdering the ENTIRE CREW Of his previous ship to "spare them" from dying at the hands of the Klingons. Um...well...

And, finally: Name-checking the Eugenics Wars. Yes, we get it, Star Trek II was a great movie. Thanks for the CONSTANT YEARLY REMINDER, FRANCHISE!