The Star Trek Thread

[Büge]

[Thad]

The Future of ‘Star Trek’: From ‘Starfleet Academy’ to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise Is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans

I like hearing that Starfleet Academy is going to be set post-Discovery. Always nice to see Trek looking forward instead of backward (though looking backward isn't all bad; Strange New Worlds knows how it's done) and there's a lot of potential in that era that they haven't explored yet.

Plus, y'know, maybe some characters from Discovery could stop by sometime. They're talking about being wary about too much continuity, which is sensible, but that doesn't mean you can't find some plot that uses Saru or whoever in a way that doesn't rely too much on backstory.

[Thad]

The baby's favorite characters are Worf and Data.

[Niku]

okay but who is the baby's favorite captain

[Thad]

The baby has only seen Picard so far but seems to like him.

The baby seems happy looking at faces in general but I think Worf and Data are the most interesting because they're not typical human faces.

[Friday]

The baby enjoys watching TNG but cannot see the episode "Aquiel"

[Mothra]

Watching the latest set of Discovery eps, for the fifth and final season.

This show is so strange to me in how it is coherent and broadly entertaining but I feel absolutely positively nothing watching it.

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 Bad:

• 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.

[Thad]

Yeah, not much to add to that except that I was like "Holy shit, the season arc is that episode where Picard blew up the ancient lab so the Romulans wouldn't find it?" and then I looked it up and nope, it wasn't even the one-off, never-acknowledged-again episode about a mysterious ancient race that I was thinking of. (I've got a ways to go before season 6! I'm just finishing up season 2.)

Also Lower Decks in canceled and the production team found out about it when Paramount+ released a promo hyping season 5 as "the final season", so that's fun.

[Mothra]

Yeah, sucks about LD. I've always hoped it would get more into a storyline, and it felt it was going in that direction, but yeah with this being the last season they'll be too focused on wrapping things up to take any risks.

Ah well, good show.

[Mothra]

(Going to post my impressions for the latest few Disco eps if there are no objections)

Face the Strange

Pretty watchable time travel ep where they do a tour of the previous Star Trek Discovery season finales. This really banked on us having a lot of affection for killed-off characters that only ever got like four speaking lines. I swear there was an entire character on the bridge, I want to say Reece, that died and his presence was supposed to be a big deal, but I could not remember if he had died and been replaced or not.

I did like how they solved this by breaking the warp bubble and exposing everything to the unshielded effects of faster than light travel. I feel like this would’ve killed everyone instantly but whatever, it was something new.

My memories of this entire episode of television are fading rapidly from my mind as I write this. Saru said… something about… it’s gone.

Mirrors

Mirrors wasn’t too bad. This reminds how promising the reboot was back in S3 before the Discovery showed back up. When it’s just Brooke and Michael as couriers, it’s a passable Star Wars adventure show.

I like Moll and L’ak’s actors quite a bit. The flashbacks super duper sucked but it is cool seeing modern Breen, even if they are exactly the same as the Emerald Chain, and every other bad guy they’ve encountered in the future. I could not possibly be less interested in the subplot about Brooke’s mentor.

The Breen story is so weird. 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? Why is it a thing?

Sad to see 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. Maybe they’re gonna have goatee’d Spock show up later or something?

At least that shot of the Enterprise pulling out of the stellar bunghole looked awesome. And Caulder and Tilly’s conversation in the bar was very good.

Also: I just realized, the entire reason this episode happened was to set up some dumbass backstory for the Section 31 movie. The crew of the ISS Enterprise crossed over, were made Federation citizens, and the leader became an admiral before “all records of her mysteriously vanish.”

Whistlespeak

Whistlespeak blew chunks and was only plodded along by some rock solid Tilly-isms. Felt like one of the many, many Stargate SG-1 episodes nobody remembers.

ST Discovery super duper does not like the Prime Directive as a thing, so all Starfleet involved just roll their eyes at it and break it as fast as not doing so becomes inconvenient. This and the ep where they reveal the secret of Saru’s planet are some real TOS-style “let’s fix the planet’s culture” biz that’s feel-good but really hollow when you’re craving some kind of substantial sci-fi. Does Starfleet just go around interfering like this now?

Erigah

Erigah is another ep that is 1/10 of a meandering straight-to-DVD Stargate SG-1 movie, here to move the season arc forward another 55 minutes. On its own, it has no dramatic weight, no story to speak of, and most egregiously, nothing that sticks with you once it’s over.

Moll and L’ak as a romance is still kind of working for me. It’s making me realize that whenever Michael and the Discovery crew are not the focus, I’m interested again, and what I’m actually enjoying is the original premise of this show: A Star Trek anthology series with new characters, new locations, new dynamics each episode or season.

Imagine if last season was a Federation ambassador vessel trying to reach and talk to Species 10C, all diplomats and shit. I would’ve eaten that up. Imagine if this season was just Moll and La’k as treasure-hunting scavs trying to get the big score so they can retire to a beach.

The cast and crew of Discovery seem completely superfluous, just happy to be here for this adventure or that, none of it connected, just thwarting end-of-the-galaxy threat after end-of-the-galaxy threat to maintain the status quo.
Thoughts on Erigah

• It is incredibly, unintentionally funny how Booke has absolutely no reason to be here in this season and the show insists on calling attention to this every episode, to the level of having each character say “You have to accept that you don’t have anything to do right now”, having characters struggle to think of a useful task for him, etc etc. It’s my favorite thing this season right now.

• Very good T’Rina ep, I loved her in this. Wouldn’t have minded this entire this just being about her and, again, almost no Disco present.

• Impossible challenge to give a flying fuck about the Breen now that they’ve been revealed to be exactly the same as the Discovery Klingons. This mysterious race has now been shown to be a warrior race of different houses that has fractured without a single leader, and needs another monarch to unify them again.

• Na’an returning for this episode was some stellar comedy as she does nothing but bungle the security of the entire Federation over and over and over for 55 minutes straight. Stellar stuff.

• Lighting and sets are looking a lot better than they did in season 1. It’s amazing how SNW got something so basic so right, right out the gate.

• Love seeing more Jet Reno, but, being told how cool Jet Reno is is way less entertaining and effective than seeing how cool Jet Reno is. They need to stop trying to impress us and just let her do shit. You have an amazing character, give her something with even a little dramatic weight. Put her on an entire mission! Give her a few episodes!

• Gray’s one and only thing continues to be “they have Impostor Syndrome, they need to learn confidence” and their story in every. Single. Episode is about this. Please god show us something else about this, anything.