Star Trek: Discovery (2017)

How are you watching Star Trek: Discovery?

  • Signed up for CBS All Access before watching the premiere

    Votes: 13 9.1%
  • Signed up for CBS All Access after watching the premiere

    Votes: 13 9.1%
  • Not signing up, but will watch if it's available for free

    Votes: 82 57.3%
  • On Netflix (Non-US viewer)

    Votes: 35 24.5%

  • Total voters
    143
I finally put my money where my mouth is and have watched neither Lower Decks, after the first episode, and none of Season 3 of Discovery, nor do I intend to.

I am happily disconnected and 100% apathetic about any modern Trek shows, and I have absolutely “zero” investment in where the show runners are taking the franchise.

There is a curious “peace at the center” that comes with this mindset. I highly encourage everyone else to give this mindset a try and to push yourself away from the table and refuse to eat what they are serving. There are better ways to spend your time.
Yup. You nailed it. That's exactly where I'm at and you're totally right, there is a peaceful calm at the center.
 
Well yeah. Did you think they made those movies NOT to put butts in seats?
Trek is a big space with room for multiple stylistic interpretations. That being said, we're talking about Discovery here and the only similarities I draw between the two are that Discovery is well shot and doesn't have cardboard sets or carpeted bridges.
No sets were ever made of cardboard.
If you were on a long deep space voyage you would want comfort so it makes sense for parts of the ship to be carpeted. Most other sci-fi shows would go for the metal treadplate for the deck, but that's such a cliche in sci-fi and why Star Trek has endured where other series are easily forgotten as generic sci-fi, Star Trek dared to be different and took forward thinking choices, which made it infinitely better.
 
No sets were ever made of cardboard.
If you were on a long deep space voyage you would want comfort so it makes sense for parts of the ship to be carpeted. Most other sci-fi shows would go for the metal treadplate for the deck, but that's such a cliche in sci-fi and why Star Trek has endured where other series are easily forgotten as generic sci-fi, Star Trek dared to be different and took forward thinking choices, which made it infinitely better.
Perhaps I was not being clear enough. All tv is artifice. With TOS the artifice is much more readily apparent than in either Discovery or the films. The actual material construction of the sets was not my point.
 
I believe it was in season 1, but did anyone notice a scene where the camera started outside the ship, port side, and panned in to the hallway right where the neck to the saucer starts on the section that connects the nacelles? The crew members were walking to the rear of the ship when they turned right.
Besides some of the special effects and continuity issues, I still enjoy the show.

TazMan2000
 
Perhaps I was not being clear enough. All tv is artifice. With TOS the artifice is much more readily apparent than in either Discovery or the films. The actual material construction of the sets was not my point.
How do you think TOS is more apparent in it's attempt to deceive than Discovery?
 
How do you think TOS is more apparent in it's attempt to deceive than Discovery?
Now, I'm going to say a thing that no one is going to like here so I want you all to be forewarned, and I'm going to explain my position. I was born in 1980. TOS was old by then. It hasn't gotten any younger since. As far as selling it's stories visually TOS always looked like it was held together by shoestring and hope to my eyes.

I know. They did amazing things for TV at the time. I get it. From my perspective it just couldn't hold a candle to the things I was a fan of by the time I was old enough to be a fan of anything. Discovery just beats the tar out of it as far as verisimilitude is concerned, even if it's by no reason other than the fact that it's decades newer and the art form has progressed exponentially in the intervening decades.

So when I say that the artifice of TOS is more apparent I mean very literally that the sets look like sets, the makeup looks like makeup, the models look like models. I don't intend to take anything away from it, but it just doesn't hold up in that way any longer in my opinion. Even as a kid I thought TOS looked 'fake' where things like Star Wars and TNG looked much more realistic.
 
I agree, most people I talk to about STD always mention how old and cheap looking TOS was and how they can't imagine why anyone would want to watch something that old and unrealistic when they could just watch the new stuff because the costumes and CGI is way better and the character dialog is way more realistic and the new crew really feels like a team in the way they talk at each other. No plywood sets with stuffy old actors who sound like robots. With the new STD on tv we are shown how excellently science fiction can be produced with one of the largest budgets in television history. I totally agree because I watch TOS all the time and that's what stands out most to me. If I wanted to listen to boring stories told by people over 50, I'd just turn the tv off and listen to my parents. I hope this STD lasts 6 seasons just like Lost.
 
I do like that they have toned down the raw, edginess. The language is much more Star Trek. Now if Picard would stop dropping F bombs I would start watching that again.

Hiwever I honestly do not know where they are going with this show. The first season shows them almost 1000 years in the future where the Federation hasn’t existed for 300 years, or something like that.

Then they meet some guy who’s working at the outpost monitoring signals. So there are true believers who keep the Federation alive.

Now they find Federation headquarters, with super advanced technology, and a somewhat fleet of ships. Controlled by an admiral and his officers.

So, the Federation does still exist, after all.
 
The third season started out strong, but is faltering. Every episode that airs, I find that I enjoy the show less. The technology is so "out there" that even THAT isn't holding my interest. It seems like they let the CG guys write the script. So much character development going on at all once just makes the show overwhelming.

TazMan2000
 
I was enjoying season three, and was happy to pretend it was the beginning of the show. The characters have calmed down and they've moved away from the familiar setting the showrunners were butchering -- a move they should've taken from the beginning. The grim'n'gritty feel that's been increasingly present since Enterprise works better for a post-apocalyptic Trek than the "Golden Age" of the 2250s through 2400s. Unfortunately, history tends to cycle from rise through fall to rise again. I narrow my eyes at the stylistic erosion of the period from First Contact on up (as seen in STO). I like more what we saw on Voyager (Equinox, Prometheus) and less what we saw in the rest (Enterprise-E, Steamrunner, Sabre, Luna, etc.... I'm not a fan of the "slab nacelle" style. I give a pass to the Akira and Norway because I otherwise like them a lot, but...). I prefer the vision of the 2390s we saw in TNG's and Voyager's finales over what we're seeing in Picard. I like the botion that the Dominion War hurt, but part of how the Federation won was by not sacrificing their moral core -- that being how Odo was able to go be an emissary to the Founders and not say, "No, you're right, the Solids are a bag of dicks."

I had come up with the notion, as a campaign setting, for the Star Trek RPG back in the early '90s, that Something Had Happened™ to subspace, rendering warp travel impossible for long enough things had broken down to some degree. A century or two. Long enough that the characters were the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the people alive during, but not so long everything got forgotten and lost. The characters' ancestors had been surveying a planet when the Thing Happened™ and, after all attempts to communicate or leave the system were thwarted, they put the ship in a parking orbit, mothballed it, and set up down on the planet. One day, some FTL-boosted computers kick back in and they realize whatever happened is clearing, they use what has been passed down and taught to them to revive the ship, and set out to see what they can find out about what the heck happened. Slow burn. They find an abandoned starbase and scavenge for parts and information, they find a derilict ship hanging in space between star systems, partial crew aboard, dead, and logs showing others had left in shuttles years before over dispute over what to do... Eventually they start finding cut-off colonies where society collapsed with no outside contact or support, and eventually core worlds who had managed to keep some semblance of civilization going with sublight travel between near stars. The "Federation" is still a thing, but a scared shell of what it once was, and so on from there.

I've apparently been tapped into the Jungian subconscious since 1987. Everything from a ship named Stargazer (in that rough configuration) months before "The Battle" named Picard's former command (I was a SilverHawks fan at the time) up to Runabouts named, successively, Orinoco and then Rubicon. Fortunately for me, the third name I came up with for my headcanon adventures hasn't turned up yet on the shows or in ancillary material. Not gonna say it, so I don't jinx it. So I'm not at all shocked that the basic premise of that year-long RPG campaign now seems to be the rough premises for the new season of Discovery and the upcoming Prodigy.

But that took a hit after all the blatantly eugenicist (in the real-world sense) talk of Humans being inherently, genetically predisposed to being dicks, to explain the Mirror Universe. I'm hoping they walk that back in future episodes, by saying "No, that was that one person's belief and they're wrong", but they haven't yet and that's worrying. I was really, really primed to like this season after the first couple episodes before that hit.
 
It's just incredible. I have some small glimmer of hope that Strange New Worlds will at least not vomit on all of what Trek was (like STD did) and that maaaaybe John DeLancie (who is a really nice guy and great to work with) can breathe some respect back into Picard, but damn... CBS must not like making money on merchandise.
 

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