Amph “Let's Fly!” - Star Trek: Discovery [Paramount+/Netflix/CraveTV]

Finally got around to watching this show. Binged the two seasons with a free trial of CBS All Access. I have so many thoughts I don't even know where to put them. I get why Trek fans take issue with it. The tone, particularly season one, is way off for Trek. The course correcting in season two definitely helped.

I think the writers have a serious problem with telling instead of showing their relationships. Luckily I think a lot of the actors are compelling and chemistry sold me on a number of the bonds.

Georgiou is my favorite character on the show. No joke I rank her with Q as just a ridiculously entertaining, scene stealing dirt bag. By the end of season two I found that liked a lot of the characters.

I like Michael Burnham a lot actually, but I do think they haven't written the stories around her very well. Just an easy example - she was given waaayyyy too many mentor relationships in two seasons, and the bonding of the characters just wasn't developed in almost any of them. The only ones I really felt invested in were her relationships with Sarek and Georgiou. I had a debate with my friend about the Georgiou one because she didn't think it was developed, but I bought it based on their time in the mirror universe laying the foundation, and then actor chemistry worked to finish it. I'd say the say the same with Ash. I do not think anything about this relationship was written well, but I thought the actors had great chemistry and so I cared enough to be invested by the end.

The only thing I hated about these two seasons was the Voq storyline. There were episodes that I finished literally feeling sick to my stomach. They were just gross and so not ST. It felt like horror at times. I was fine with them basically just moving forward and ignoring it because I do like the Ash actor.

Biggest thing is this show does not have that og Trek vibe that the Pike/Number One/Spock visual had at the end of season two. I'm okay with that but I do understand why others aren't. I find that I compare Discovery more to DS9 and The Expanse and that makes it doable for me.

Oh one more negative thing - I absolutely hated how they wrote Section 31. I actually couldn't believe it. Now I hear they're considering making it its own show and I just don't get it. I mean, it's one thing to bend canon, but this was borderline intolerable. It felt like these writers had never seen a Section 31 episode in any series.

 

The jump at the end of S2 does promise a potentially new show (with way less canon headaches) but I do get a little bummed that they left the non-DISCO supporting cast behind, the Pike Enterprise crew, Mudd, Sarek. Hell, maybe even Tyler (just a little bit). I don't know how they do a section 31 show if Georgiou jumped although I have a feeling she'll just jump back. Or maybe 1000 years in the future only Section 31 of the Federation remains!

It would be that "oh we'll see these on the Pike show!" but of all the shows announced so far, Pike isn't one of them.

 

And fans are clamoring for it.

 

I would be very surprised if TPTB aren't tucked away in some smoke filled backroom discussing a timetable for the production of a Pike show. My guess is that they'll wait for numbers on Picard and the S31 shows before they add anything further. Still, four shows of 13 episodes each season could easily mean a new episode each week for a year.

 

I'm writing an STD-based fic, and have a question - since Memory Alpha seems designed for far more hardcore ST fans than myself - were there tricorders in the Discovery era?

From the Season One dvd, I binge-watched up to the arrival in the Mirror Universe, then stopped for the time being...though that has stretched to several weeks.

Can't wait for the Season Two dvd. The Youtube clips look absolutely awesome, and Discovery's partnership with the Enterprise looks great, and has fantastic visuals, especially the OG bridge.

I don't understand what is so unbelievable about a centuries-old organisation that is small time during DS9, having been more open and large-scale at some earlier point in it's history.

 

Given that Discovery is supposed to be just a few years behind TOS era, I would imagine that there would be tricorders. Likely along the lines of what McCoy and Co. used in TOS

 

I can't for the life of me remember someone using a ticorder on Discovery which is odd considering it happens after The Cage (although were there tricorders in The Cage).

 

I thought STD was ten years before The Cage.

 

nah The Cage has already happened, Pike had a whole flashback about it and was chatting with his Talosian vision girlfriend in S2. I think it happened, like, a year ago by the time Discovery happens.

Confusion may happen that The Cage is actually set 10 years before The Original Series. So it is the 1st episode of TOS that's a prequel to TOS.

 

Pike's reaction to learning what's going to happen to him is easily my favourite part of the whole season.

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I have a wee bit of a feeling that they could save Pike from his Beep Chair fate if they go alt timelines with it now that he knows. Or the final episode of Pike TeeVee Series is him accepting his fate in that radiation accident (and they can just reuse the footage too)

 

So I finally got my hands on a copy of the DVD from the library, and I'm picking up from where I left off when CBS gave us that one pilot episode for free. I think I understand binge-watching now.

Also, I seem to recall Georgiou actually shooting Michael at the end of the first episode...but apparently I remembered wrong? Or maybe I'm getting it mixed up with Leia zapping Poe in The Last Jedi.

 

Burnham does the Vulcan neck pinch on Georgiou which is basically what starts the Klingon war. Although technically it was bad advice from Sarek.

 

No. But give me a Pike Enterprise series. The last episode was a big tease.


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Wait how does Michael start the war? She's telling the bridge crew to open fire, but she doesn't actually get around to it before Georgiou shows up...and it ends up being the Klingons who fire first.

 

He got the Obi-Wan spending years on Tatooine treatment.

 

So I just got to the mirror universe episodes. I'm glad to see that Burnham can maintain her cover much better than a certain SHIELD agent I could think of...

 

Awwwww!

Cuteness comes in different packages, and right now, as I dip a toe into the Mirror Universe episodes, I find Tilly's lines as an ISS captain, the epitome of cute:

"This is Captain Tilly! What the heck heck hell! What the hell! .....Hold your horses!"

That scene is on my phone now.

I love how she asks Lorca if he has noticed how she talks a lot.

 

Yeah, I’m just at the tail end of the Mirror Universe arc. I’m debating with myself how badly I want smack Burnham and Cornwell.

 

Well, it wasn’t so much that it was bad advice from Sarek, it was more that Sarek explicitly that the solution to peace between the Klingons and the Vulcans was achieved in a manner that only Vulcans would think of.

 

Tilly trying to talk to the Mirror-verse is peak Tilly and basically when I totally started to love her.

 

We need a Pike series with Spock.

 

I wish I noticed this back when you posted it. I don’t remember this series as well anymore, which says something about where it ranks for me in Trek.

Section 31 was also in Enterprise. It wasn’t like that. This is essentially TOS time period. That kind of Section 31 running around in that era borderline ruins it in my mind. The Federation is an idealized utopian idea. Kirk and Spock and the rest were true idealists. DSC’s Section 31 makes them hypocrites.

I’m not quite monofocused because I’m stoked for Picard and I like the idea of DSC becoming Andromeda in the Trek universe. But I really want this Pike series. I have a fear, though, that they’ll do it but not the way I want. I want a Pike/Spock/Number One series that is episodic like TOS, not serialized. I want a traditional Trek show about exploration. I’m afraid they’ll bend to fans on this one, and then take this lovable, optimistic cast and put them in constantly dystopian settings... with Section 31, ugh.