-
Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:
- The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
- Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration
Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.
Star Trek: Discovery - Disco isn't dead
- Thread starter SpoonyBard
- Start date
Apparently his species was seen just once before, in the DS9 episode Armageddon Game where they were one of the two that tried to kill Bashir and OBrien as part of some extreme measures to prevent genocidal weapons from being used again. Which tracks well enough I guess.
Gonna put the good above the cut and the bad below. This show is so strange to me in how it is coherent and broadly entertaining but I feel absolutely positively nothing watching it.
Extremely well-acted as always though.
The good:
Extremely well-acted as always though.
The good:
- Loved the scenes with Saru and Michael together, walking through the woods and chatting. Disco has needed to give its characters space like this for a while, it was real refreshing getting two people just chatting at leisure.
- The smugger couple is fun, I'm enjoying them so far.
All the shots of their ship doing something, like the countermeasures or the in-atmo laser barrage, was cool as hell. The effects for that ship look great.
- Enjoyed Frank quite a bit, really cool seeing another Soong-type android, with the implications that synths continued to grow and become a unique species, with all the variety that comes with.
- The two ships blocking the sandstorm was a cool use of the shields in-atmosphere, love seeing a creative use of the tech.
- Jet Reno gets another laugh-out-loud line from me during the interviews.
- Still really love the "absolute candor" aspect of NuTrek, and Michael with not-Shaw in the debriefing room was great. One of my favorite Michael scenes in a while.
- The "Red Directive" paints an incredibly bleak picture of where the Federation has ended up. So you are telling me that in the Federation, in the Federation of the future, you will be expected to just do a mission "for the security of the Federation" where you are not told what your are doing or why, and are thus not equipped to make any kind of moral determination? And you get a license to kill and are indeed told not to worry about causalities, because the ends justify the means? You cannot have this black ops shit if you want us to believe the Federation is a just organization. Even the Omega Directive required the captain to know what the aspect of critical importance was, so they could make moral determinations.
Shaw 2 says that he's been on 7 different Red Directives during his career. These things apparently happen all the time, which is deranged.
- To the above, it seems super duper likely that Kovich is Section 31, and that Section 31 not only exists in the future, but exerts power at the highest level of the Federation. Even the President of the Federation is powerless to the whims of the space CIA, answerable to nobody.
Really hope I'm wrong about this but if I am, who is Kovich answerable to? Why do they have a guy like this? Why is it so hard for NuTrek to imagine a government or navy that isn't the 21st-century United States?
- Frank was a great new character, was interested in learning more about him. But, because he's a morally grey character due to him being involved in buying/selling smuggled goods, he is instantly executed so that cosmic justice can be delivered. Continues the NuTrek tradition, alongside Sneed and Shaw of killing off any promising new unique character you introduce if they are not unambiguously a good-coded heroic character.
- Continues to drive me insane how reckless our heroes are. Starfleet blasts in to a desert planet, and because it is not a Federation planet, they immediately get into a shooting chase (on speeder bikes) with two smugglers they want. This rapidly escalates as the smugglers beeline for the mountain, at which point the Federation does an orbital strike on an explosives cache in the mountain knowing that there is a 30% chance this kills every man, woman, and child in the city. The bad guys then follow Starfleet's example and try to blow up the mountain, causing the avalanche, and Starfleet scrambles to protect the city from the disaster they caused.
I know this is just action movie logic but man does it not gel with Star Trek as an idea. You have to imagine Starfleet as this like Bad Boys cartoon cowboy justice org that causes death and disaster wherever their latest military adventure takes them.
- I truly legit thought for a cold-blooded moment that Michael was about to elect her boyfriend as the XO of the ship. Holy hell was I relieved that it was Shaw 2 instead. I have this dire feeling that when Shaw 2 eats it later this season it's gonna be Booker that gets field-promoted from smuggler to XO of a Starfleet vessel within two years.
- The way they are collecting zelda keys that slot into a 3D-printed insignia makes me want to die. My prediction for this season is that they will get directions to a Progenitor Genesis device they used to originally seed the galaxy, and some guy will either intentionally or unintentionally try to activate it, destroying all life and/or remaking the galaxy in their image.
I know the showrunners said they didn't plan for this season to be the final one, but a "time travel through the greatest hits and meet yourself with a different hairstyle" episode is totally a final season kind of episode
Edit to add a mini gripe: I'm not sure if the reasoning of "you would sacrifice yourself to save the entire frickin' galaxy" is the most compelling way to convince someone you're from the future because that seems like the baseline for a Starfleet officer but maybe that's a thing they added to the command tests later. It's like "name eight starships" "Enterprise" "that's on me, I set the bar too low" meme levels
Edit to add a mini gripe: I'm not sure if the reasoning of "you would sacrifice yourself to save the entire frickin' galaxy" is the most compelling way to convince someone you're from the future because that seems like the baseline for a Starfleet officer but maybe that's a thing they added to the command tests later. It's like "name eight starships" "Enterprise" "that's on me, I set the bar too low" meme levels
Last edited:
When you put it that way, sure. But I think the writers either weren’t that creative or just wrote themselves into a corner.
The easiest way of convincing someone you’re you is by telling them something they shouldn’t know, and couldn’t be easily looked up. Something very private. But that works 1-on-1, and it would be weird/bad to out someone’s deepest secrets in front of an audience.
I think that scene still kinda works though. It works if you consider her as a character with a reputation for never giving up/accepting defeat. Like Kirk. Problem of course, is that Airiam is a non-entity, so it’s not very convincing to us the audience when that’s not a pre-established fact.
I think that scene still kinda works though. It works if you consider her as a character with a reputation for never giving up/accepting defeat. Like Kirk. Problem of course, is that Airiam is a non-entity, so it’s not very convincing to us the audience when that’s not a pre-established fact.
Yeah, for sure. The scene on the bridge worked fine for me overall. The instance that *did* pull me out for a moment is wondering why one earth she didn't tell herself something secret/private in order to avoid both a fistfight and a later confrontation that nearly scuppered the whole plan. But I guess a one-on-one with your past self is too fun a set-piece to leave on the floor. And I suppppppose you could handwave that past Burnham, being at probably the most distrustful point of her life, would just assume that the probable shape-shifter she was confronting was also reading her thoughts or something.
This week's episode of Disco leveraged some pre-exiting sets in fun ways and had a lot of important lore moments. I'm gonna miss this show when it's gone.
This one was pretty solid! Reminds of how fun it was having Booke and Michael's Star Wars adventures in early S3 before the Disco showed up.
The good:
The good:
- Still enjoying Moll and L’ak’s actors quite a bit.
- Fun seeing the new look for the Breen.
- That shot of the Enterprise pulling out of the stellar bunghole looked awesome.
- Caulder and Tilly’s conversation in the bar was very good, I wanted more of that.
- Goddd the Breen flashbacks. So like, they have a fluid jelly face and then a regular solid Star Trek alien face, and the civil war they’re in is over whether or not they should go into their second form? Why does that matter? Hard to feel any real way about this, it's like the white-black TOS aliens or something.
- Lordy I wish the Breen didn't look exactly the same as the Emerald Chain, and every other bad guy they’ve encountered in the future.
- Desperately trying to care about the subplot about Brooke’s mentor. I think we need to meet this character or see some flashbacks to get some kind of meaningful investment here.
- Devastated seeing Moll and L’ak ship blow up, that thing was cool.
- It is so incredibly strange that they shoehorned in the mirror-universe Enterprise here. I get that they wanted to nod to SWN and use the sets but like, why did this happen?
Last edited: