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The ship is officially Crossfield class.
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You realize that's Doug Jones, right? If there's any actor ever who has experience at acting through prosthetics, it's Doug Jones.
- Saru is my man. I love a shameless coward. And the actor manages to convey a surprising lot of emotional depth considering how much cosmetics he has to do it through.
You realize that's Doug Jones, right? If there's any actor ever who has experience at acting through prosthetics, it's Doug Jones.
Doug Jones is amazing as Saru; easily in my top five favorite Trek characters of all time, and only after three episodes. Cadet Tilly may be heading in that direction as well. And I enjoyed the haze of crazy coming off of Captain Malfoy.
* calling your character "Gabriel Lorca", presumably after Gabriel García Marquez and Federico García Lorca, is like calling your English-speaking character, I don't know, Caprain Norman Hemingway or something. I could give the Gabriel a free pass but the Lorca is suspicious. Imperator wanna weigh in?
Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand was right. Vicissitude is from outer space.+1 for Saru and Cap'n Malfoy. Picking up a strong "what if Picard had a Magnificent Bastard, vaguely psychopathic brother" vibe off of him.
Also if you have a corny Spanish last name*, and keep the lights out and manipulate people I will assume you are a Lasombra vampire. Holy crap, their conquer the Universe screed in the VtM2 clanbook was for realsies. And come think of it, these Klingon look Vicissitude-y...**
I just have to note that I have an ethnically half Spanish/half British nephew with the first and middle name Gabriel Norman.* calling your character "Gabriel Lorca", presumably after Gabriel García Marquez and Federico García Lorca, is like calling your English-speaking character, I don't know, Caprain Norman Hemingway or something. I could give the Gabriel a free pass but the Lorca is suspicious. Imperator wanna weigh in?
He's finally getting his campaign started! Stop trying to distract him.** Doc Sammy should totally write this fanfic.
I very much enjoyed this week's episode. You gotta give the show credit - it's one thing to make a ham-fisted peace-and-love message by showing a pointless quarrel between aliens with two different kinds of rubber foreheads. It's another to make you feel sorry for a huge, slimy bug-monster who's gone on repeated killer rampages. And yet...
Also, someone really needs to make a "and yet my ganglia remain unconvinced" meme.
I'll see your Phantom Menace and raise you Voyager, Nemesis and Enterprise.My best friend in high school and college was a huge Star Wars nerd, and I am a huge Star Trek nerd. We had Star Trek vs. Star Wars arguments all the time, albeit mostly jokingly. Sadly, I lost touch with him by the time The Phantom Menace rolled around, or I could have had laughs for months...
The fourth episode was good, but episodes three and five were pretty danged gory for no good reason. I'm glad that the show was renewed for a second season though. It's not my Star Trek, but I'm glad that new Star Trek is around in some form.
There will be about a year break between seasons though. And there's a rumor...
Towards the end of the second season, the U.S.S. Discovery will run into the U.S.S. Enterprise as captained by Christopher Pike. Then CBS will work on a second Star Trek show, set on the Enterprise (no bloody A, B, C, or D) with Captain Christopher Pike. The Enterprise show would alternate with Discovery, so every week there would be new Star Trek.
So...
Not a Trek fan.
Trek likes to get political. Not political in the sense of, "We use politics and intrigue in some of our story arcs" political, but "We have a VISION of the future, and you're going to love it!" political.
And that's okay. I'm not making a criticism; I'm making an observation. B5, which I loved, had its own political and even religious overtones. The difference is that in B5 and other shows like it, the ideology didn't get in the way of the story, and in Trek, it did.
I can't say where Discovery comes down on this line, as I still haven't been willing to pay money for All Access. If Fuller had stayed on as a showrunner, it would be a must watch, but right now, it is something I will certainly watch if it shows up on a service I have, but I am not dipping into my entertainment budget to watch it.
That sounds reasonable.Well, I can tell you that characters on the show do a lot of things because they feel it's necessary, and often those things are what ensures that they win and survive. The universe does not guarantee victory for morally upright people, and while most people want to be morally upright if reasonably possible, they also aren't willing to be martyred. In that respect, I'd almost go so far as to call it "realistic" - people want to be good, it's just not the only thing they want, and often the other things they want take precedence.
On the other hand, there is no real conflict of idealogy. All the characters more or less believe in the rightness of the Federation's ideals, where they differ is on when and how much it's okay to compromise them for the greater good.
I stopped watching after the fifth episode, but yeah, Discovery's politics are pretty subdued. They're there, but you have to go looking for them. Unlike Supergirl, which consistently hits you upside the head with a 2 by 4 with its political ideology nearly every episode, especially after the first season.
Well... I disagree, but I'd be hard pressed to put into words why. I mean, you say the characters aren't interesting, but they interest me. I'm not sure I can describe exactly why, I can just report that I keep wanting to tune in week after week to see what happens to them. I'll grant you that the plot is nothing special, though. It works, but it's not what you'd call impressive.
At least we can agree that the complaints about the politics are overblown. I'm if anything oversensitive to being preached at, and I didn't find anything risable there.
Well, I can tell you that characters on the show do a lot of things because they feel it's necessary, and often those things are what ensures that they win and survive. The universe does not guarantee victory for morally upright people, and while most people want to be morally upright if reasonably possible, they also aren't willing to be martyred. In that respect, I'd almost go so far as to call it "realistic" - people want to be good, it's just not the only thing they want, and often the other things they want take precedence.
On the other hand, there is no real conflict of idealogy. All the characters more or less believe in the rightness of the Federation's ideals, where they differ is on when and how much it's okay to compromise them for the greater good.
Okay, before I say anything, I am going to use the word politics in my post, but I am in no way going to bring in any real world politics. I am just talking about the concept of politics abstractly.
I feel like people often use the term "politics" when they mean "ideology". Let's look at the dictionary definition...
The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
The key here for me is "debate or conflict". The original Star Trek had a little of this, with Kirk, Spock and McCoy having slightly different ideologies. However, TNG was completely free of this. The Federation was a hive mind with a single ideology and no politics at all. It would kind of introduce politics through the planet of the week, but this was just a straw conflict to show us that main characters were smarter and better then them.
Babylon 5 certainly had an underlying ideology at times, but it also had genuine politics going on. Even the main characters had deadly conflicts between each other. You mostly got a sense of what side the show was on, but that often didn't affect who was actually going to win this week. Being right wasn't always enough.
With TNG, the ideology always determined the outcome. With B5, the politics could determine the outcome even if it meant things went badly for the good guys sometimes. Not that Babylon 5 was a relentless misery fest. The good guys got away with a lot. It was just a never a sure thing.
I think it is easier to like B5 even if you disagree with JMS' ideology because the plots aren't all set up to show the inevitable victory of his ideology in the same way that TNG was set up to show the rightness of Roddenberry's ideas. Then there are the characters. People are basically just people on B5, for good and bad. People on TNG are too hemmed in by having to represent ideas. I remember during the first run of the show, watching the first season episode where they find the frozen people from the 20th Century. The episode was supposed to be lesson about how flawed and inferior 20th Century people were compared to the awesome characters on the show. Personally, that was a defining moment where I realized what plastic pod people they all were.
It's my head canon that the parasite bugs from "Conspiracy" had already won. Humans are gone in TNG. They are just hosts for alien parasites unconvincingly masquerading as humans.
I can't say where Discovery comes down on this line, as I still haven't been willing to pay money for All Access. If Fuller had stayed on as a showrunner, it would be a must watch, but right now, it is something I will certainly watch if it shows up on a service I have, but I am not dipping into my entertainment budget to watch it.
The point I really lost interest in STD was when I realized that the MC is totes a GM pet NPC.
But she's awkward around people. Not too awkward apparently, as she was a command officer prior to being demoted. :rolleyes:
I want to know about the other characters! The redhead. The captain. The borg-looking chick on the bridge (what's her story), the Asian tactical officer who gets yelled at a lot by the captain.
The chief engineer gets a good deal of focus, but only to establish the setup for the importance of Discovery. What do we really know about him other than he's a genius, snarky, and gay?
You can't talk about STD without engageing the politics, just a little, because the creators themselves made the show political, by their own words.
That's uncharitable. :p Though I do see what you mean. It's true that all previous Trek series have had ensemble casts, while this one has a main character with a supporting cast. I can understand that making people feel like it's "not Trek anymore," because it's certainly a fairly major change to the formula, but at the same time... the formula is half a decade old. They needed to try something new with it.
Meh, so she's awkward around people when she has to treat them as people instead of as moving parts in an ongoing tactical scenario. That's not an unheard-of character type.
I admit, I'd kind of like to know more about them too.
Well... he's a peaceful researcher who's passionate about the pursuit of science, and deeply resentful at having been commendeered into the war effort. He's vain and ambitious and can get manipulated by appealing to his hope of going down in history. He and his boyfriend bicker like an old married couple but value each other's forthrightness. He's rude and pessimistic, but is something of a softie at heart. I dunno, it's not that he's that complex, but I'd say I know about as much about him as I do about Burnham?
This is why I've come to avoid creator commentary like the plague. Creators always manage to say something stupid that makes me like their work less. :p
I'll concede that some detail was given to the engineer, but he's more of the exception than the rule. Nobody else gets this treatment.
Fuck Saru, Burnham, Stamets (unsubtly named after a famous mycologist), Tyler and his Klingon or Klingon-porking ass, Tilly, everyone.
This show should be named Star Trek: Captain Motherfucking Lorca.
He’s the real secret weapon. They took Picard’s sophisticated uppity Euro brain and sewed Kirk’s colossal blue-black testicles on it.
The difference is that in B5 and other shows like it, the ideology didn't get in the way of the story, and in Trek, it did.
Isn't that the show where, right in the middle of a war, the chief medical officer decides to leave everything and go on a "walkabout" to "discover himself"?
It is. But IMO, his actions weren't driven by an ideological motive. Rather, he had become addicted to stims, they were affecting his long-term performance, and he was doing what he thought he needed to do to overcome his addition.
I just remember catching that episode way back when and it seemed such a bizarrely self-indulgent thing considering what was going on around him that its stuck with me to this day. I'm not saying it has anything to do with ideology specifically, it was just this bizarre thing I associate with B5 as a show.
By the by, I cant believe they went with a name for this show that they knew was going to be acronym-ized as "STD"