The Star Trek Thread

[Mothra]

Re: 3x12, "There is a tide...":

I know there was never any possibility that Discovery would resolve anything with diplomacy rather than a big, dumb, overlong action slog wherein everyone on the bad guy side is killed, but, why even tease us with the full third of this ep being devoted to negotiations with the Emerald Chain?

Admiral Salt & Pepper must’ve known that the Emerald Chain lady would never willingly make a deal where she would be tried for her crimes, right? Seemed like the best deal you’re going to get? You abolish slavery across the entire Chain and the Chain stops exploiting pre-warp civilizations?

I also can’t parse if this was actually supposed to be the Emerald Chain lady trying to cut a deal with the Federation? Everything she did leading up to that, including busting in to the Federation secret base with a ruse, implied she was just trying to destroy the Federation. But then she’s actually legitimately here for negotiations? And then Admiral Salt & Pepper doesn’t budge on anything, until she storms off in an outrage? The fuck was the point of any of that?

My prediction for the final episode: Su'Kal will have an emotional reaction that will unintentionally destroy a shitload of dilithium, vaporizing the Emerald Chain lady's entire ship, killing her and all of her jack-booted stormtroopers cleanly. Then they'll bring him back to the Federation, explain the cause of the Burn, and give the Federation spore drive technology. They'll then go back through time again, to places unknown.

MAYBE the guy in the wheelchair will take on ownership of the Emerald Chain and agree to all Federation terms. That's if they remember.

[JD]

I don't get it. Osyraa has complete control of Discovery and the technical resources to reverse-engineer its technology. Instead, she uses the ship as leverage to negotiate an alliance with the Federation in order to... gain access to their brand? It's politically unpopular, both sides will lose their core values (the Federation their moral standing, the Chain substantial profits), the gains are vaguely defined, and they think the deal can be banged out in a day without any political debate. What is this, Brexit?

From the Federation's point of view, Osyraa now has both the spore drive (the mere knowledge of which is highly classified) and the location of Federation headquarters. It's a really bad idea to let her leave. Starfleet outnumbers her many-to-one, and now have Stamets, the only irreplacable crew member. The logical option is to board and retake Discovery, call any casualties acceptable losses, and imprison Osyraa and her crew for numerous crimes against the Federation.

I appreciated the Die Hard references, though.

My guess is that Osyraa rejects the offer she spent a whole episode setting up, because going to Federation jail so her political rivals can get spore drive tech fair and square sounds like a terrible deal. It turns out she sent the Federation HQ's location to the Chain as insurance. Osyraa finds the location of Dilithium Planet from Booker. She jumps Discovery to Dilithium Planet, either because Stamets returns to Discovery and voluntarily works for her so that he can rescue his family, or because wheelchair guy has already worked out how to reverse-engineer the tardigrade DNA and inject himself so he can pilot the ship. The wheelchair guy will betray Osyraa at a key moment because he disagrees with her morals. In a dramatic deus ex machina, Su'Kal will destroy Osyraa with his dilithium-exploding powers before conveniently either dying or turning out to be a hologram, and he will no longer pose a threat once they shut down the holoprogram. Unfortunately, Federation headquarters' location is no longer secret, so Starfleet moves its headquarters to Dilithium Planet. Now the Federation has unlimited dilithium and reasonable assurances that the Burn won't happen again, the day is saved, and all the bad guys are dead. I don't think they'll travel back to the past after this, but they will hastily set up for some new conflict in season 4.

[Mothra]

I am so beyond convinced that all that's gonna happen is Osyraa will be killed and replaced by the wheelchair guy (who I cannot stress enough has just just-now been introduced as a character), who will agree wholesale to all the Federation's terms. Diplomacy in this sense will be "do not budge on anything, if they do not agree, kill the current leader and replace them with someone sympathetic to our ideals".

Also I have to point out that Detmer's brain damage C-plot never amounted to anything throughout this entire season, she was always fully able to pilot with as much talent and ability as she's always had. It is the most Discovery thing in the world to introduce this weird dangling plot thread and never resolve it.

[Thad]

I really liked the negotiation sequence itself; I liked the idea that she'd simply maneuvered the Federation into a position where they couldn't refuse her offer because it's straight-up inarguably for the greater good, but then it breaks down because she can't get past her ego and they can't get past their moralizing. It reminded me a lot of the original 1961 Death of Superman.

I even liked the Die Hard bit, even if it nudged the audience a little too hard. "Look, her feet are bleeding! Hah? Hah? Get it? We're doing a Die Hard reference!"

But then the third act hits, and nothing anyone does from that point on makes any sense. Both the admiral and Michael seem really keen on letting Osyraa come back onboard Discovery, and...why? How is anybody any better off than if she'd just let Stamets make the damn jump? It's all "here's our cliffhanger; work backwards from there" plotting.

[Thad]

Welp.

I thought the Su'Kal portion of the episode was pretty well-handled, even if it was predictable. I didn't care much for any of the Discovery part of the episode.

The setup for season 4 is a perfectly decent hook and I think there's a lot they can do with it. Disappointed to see Saru sidelined, but at least they implied he'll be coming back at some point. And hey, if Jones is taking a break from Discovery, that probably means he'll be showing up somewhere else. I'm still hoping he'll show back up on What We Do in the Shadows.

On the whole I think this still managed to be the best season to date. It had its share of bullshit, including, unfortunately, most of the finale, but on the other hand it wasn't as shaky as season 1 and its season arc wasn't nearly as tedious as the one in season 2. It's still got some kinks to work out but I feel like this was the season it started to find its footing.

[Mothra]

Definitely agree that the Su'Kal portion worked overall. This was a good combination of characters for this, and thanks to the action shlockfest happening on Discovery, we didn't have anyone yelling at Saru, Culber, Adira, and Gray to go faster faster faster. The pacing in the Su'Kal portion was actually good, with people talking through issues in an interesting way.

On the Disco, obviously, it was a big, dumb, eye-rolling dual-wielding blasting-motorcycle-Remans nothing. I did like the elevator sequence with Michael, that was kinda fun. Holy shit was that whole thing with the bridge crew and the Disney bots dumb. And like, everything with the Emerald Chain ended up being pointless - they really were never anything but an evil empire that showed up halfway through the season, randomly. The solution was "detonate our warp core and kill everyone on the ship".

I'd agree this was largely the least-worst season yet. Book was a good add, and I ended up liking Adira and Gray by the end. As always, hopefully they slow the fuck down for the next season and earn some of these big emotional moments they love so much.

[Blossom]

makes my shadow grow

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

I like all the comments along the lines of "'Watch The Irishman Suffer' was like, every fifth episode".

[Thad]

I thought the season premier of Discovery was great. No real complaints. I could nitpick but nah, no sense focusing on minor gripes. Good plot, good characterization, good mystery for the season arc, good debate about moral philosophy. I like where it's headed.

Prodigy's got potential. It's still kind of in that phase some children's cartoons go through where the leads are kind of assholes so they have room for character growth, and also need to be taught things that the eight-year-olds in the audience might not know (so let me get this straight: her father's been training her to pilot the starship, but also no one has ever explained to her that you can navigate using stars?), but I'd say despite some early growing pains there's a lot more to like than not.

[mharr]

Can you navigate an ftl ship by the stars? That sounds bloody hard compared to using the fixed night sky of a single planet.

[Thad]

Yeah but sooner or later you're probably going to find yourself on a planet somewhere.

[Mongrel]

I mean, I would assume that you can by using really faraway stars, at least in a very general sense. It's not like there's any GPS in space (or maybe there is! who knows?), so maybe advanced navigation systems would still use distant stars as reference points?

Obviously I don't think a human would be able to manually input any sort of exact navigation information to an FTL drive by eyeballing the starfield outside the ship. But learning a little bit of stellar navigation might still be important in the way we learn basic math even though we mostly use calculators when actually working?

[mharr]

I assume a human could eyeball FTL co-ordinates exactly one time. Fair point that it's always good if you can spot obvious wrongness at a glance though.

[Thad]

Okay but what I'm getting at is that there's a scene where they're on a planet that keeps rearranging itself so they can't find their way back to the ship and eventually the lead figures out that the stars don't move even when everything else does.

And for most of the cast, okay, fine, they're a bunch of child prisoners who live underground, so it's very easy to believe this is information that never occurred to them before.

But the leading lady is the emperor's daughter. She was not raised in an underground prison, she's privileged and appears to have a pretty advanced education for her age. There's no damn reason it should take her so long to observe that stars are fixed points and you can use them to figure out what direction you're going at night, except that this is a show for 8-to-12-year-olds and they want to give the 8-year-olds a chance to figure it out before the characters on the show do.

[Thad]

"We've lost our connection to Discovery and I'm unable to send any data back," says the hologram being remotely controlled by someone on Discovery.

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

[Thad]

I liked the Prodigy episode where whatsisface went on a holodeck mission with Spock, Scotty, Uhura, Beverly Crusher, and Odo, and the audio team didn't even try to hide that all their lines were just repurposed dialogue from their previous appearances. Like Spock will have two lines in a row and they don't just have different room tone from the rest of the episode, they have different room tone from each other too.

I'm not being facetious. I thought it was kind of great. There are certainly contexts where that kind of dialogue reuse can be jarring -- Rise of Skywalker, looking at you -- but in this context, where it's both a cartoon and a holodeck episode, I found it charming.

[Friday]

"We've lost our connection to Discovery and I'm unable to send any data back," says the hologram being remotely controlled by someone on Discovery.

You're a difficult man to reach, Mr. Mulder.