StillPaisleyCat @ StillPaisleyCat @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

Vanguard is darker even than DS9, so not everyone’s taste.

What it does have is not only Starfleet on-station but also 4 ships that are based there from a scout explorer to a Constitution class. It’s a lot of characters. Plus Tholians and Klingons. The mystery takes a bit to come together but it’s excellent.

The Enterprise and her crew show up occasionally but aren’t the primary characters. There is one Vanguard novel recently add that is Enterprise-focused and is one of the best books since Destiny.

Directors, actors and art directors seem to be very happy to tread the ground of adaptations.

What we really have is some writers that want to tell their own Star Trek stories but aren’t doing a good job of serialization and studio executives who think that rehashing existing stories and characters will buy success.

And yes we have egos like Patrick Stewart’s holding his character hostage to his own reinterpretation of his character to be a reflection of himself.

But as we have seen with the character of Jim Kirk, there can be other actors to carry on the legacy.

That’s not really the point though.

While Slow Horses, Reached or Silo had their print audiences, they are not adapted solely because they are reaching enormous audiences as books. They have become successful shows because someone made the case for adaptation to the studios.

Star Trek has been struggling to make serialized live action shows successfully. Why not go with what works and adapt that?

Tie-in writers are writers for hire.

They don’t own any of the IP for their creations. All the IP is owned by Paramount.

Star Trek television has directly taken concepts from Treklit for Discovery and Picard without any credit whatsoever to the print authors who created them.

Screenwriters who created guest characters like Locarno are owed some credit and residuals but these are very modest.

There was a good recent thread on this. Much depends on your own preferences.

I posted the image of the first book of the TOS era series Vanguard because I think it would be excellent to adapt to television. It’s about Starbase 47 serving Starfleet in a region of Federation expansion and colonization. It’s somewhat dark and there’s a mystery at the core. Tholians get extensive treatment which is rare.

If you’re looking for the Alpha and Omega of the Borg, the Destiny trilogy is excellent. It’s basically the best Borg content out there.

If you’re into time travel, Christopher L. Bennett has a series of books about the Bureau of Temporal Investigations.

There was also a great anthology of novellas focused on the Starfleet Corps of Engineers.

There are numerous great standalones too.

Frankly, we saw more in Pike’s face and heard more in his tone of voice — grim and determined - than any debates might have given us.

We were shown rather than told, and that’s a good thing.

This was arguably Anson Mount’s best, most sincere, performance as Pike since Discovery season two. There’s been a glibness in Pike in SNW. Both episodes 5 and 6 this season have turned that around.

It was also another episode where Una showed that she really was Pike’s First Officer and principal advisor.

I don’t think we’re that far apart in views but we are very different in terms of who we think needs to lead the change.

I’m putting the onus on societal level changes in the built environment and acceptance of children and persons with disabilities.

You seem to be putting the onus on individuals to drive the change by personally overcoming barriers.

You are proudly talking about how you personally have overcome barriers but not everyone can. With 30% or the adult population identifying with at least one disability, it’s not a small or isolated issue.

As is said in the disability community, not everyone has the spoons and certainly not every day. Don’t shame others for what they may not be able to accomplish that you can.

The 15 minute journey problem is primarily evidence of a problem with where stores and services are located in relation to residences.

Affordability notwithstanding, bike and public transit as a person with visual, hearing or mobility limitations remain deeply challenging in most communities.

Wonderful that your children and grandchildren have been able to meet expectations or haven’t faced needs that couldn’t be accommodated. Most persons or families experiencing disabilities wouldn’t have your experience or might put their limited spoons to other priorities.

It’s not a small minority who cannot manage as pedestrians, with active or even better public transportation.

Easily said, for a healthy young adult who doesn’t have to support young children.

Having been entirely car free until we had young children, it was a true eye opener to have to confront how difficult it is to get kids to medical appointments and activities without a car.

Urban design doesn’t provide infrastructure for families in the core. It’s not just a transportation choice issue. Cities would need to be designed very differently and greater physical and social accommodations for children and persons with disabilities and neurodivergence would be needed.

When kids became part of our lives, we deliberately chose to live as close to the core and public transit as we could and still be near schools, community centres and hospitals. It still put us in a semi-suburban style older neighborhood where some reliance on a car became necessary.

Unreliability of public transit is much more problematic when you have to transport young children who chill quickly when not moving in deeply cold weather.

Also, many children cannot consistently meet the behavioural expectations adults on public transit or elsewhere.

Adults aren’t shy to tell parents that they shouldn’t bring their kids into public spaces when they can’t meet behavioural expectations, but getting a kid having a meltdown home or a sick kid to a physician or hospital without a car is nearly impossible.

We made the choice to be a single car family to limit our environmental impact but that in itself was very challenging.

By the time our kids were independent teens, we found our own physical limitations with ageing reduced the viability of active transportation as our main approach. We could choose to move to another area but not without pushing our kids out to find their own housing.

I don’t see the documentary as the A-plot at all.

It was constantly present as a frame, but the episode wasn’t primarily about the documentary - it was primarily about how Starfleet captains and senior crew wrestle with ethical decisions when their orders do not align with their values, and how they seek to find information that can provide a rationale to pursue an alternative course of action.

Basically, it showed how important the crew that is present in the situation is and how that makes Starfleet more than just a military organization serving a military mission.

My partner and I really liked this one.

We both think it’s in the top rank of Star Trek episodes. In my view it may be the best of SNW to date.

It definitely should be the ‘For Your Consideration’ episode of this season.

The direction was excellent. This was one of the best dramatic performances from Mount as Pike since season two of Discovery.

My sense is that some viewers were mistaking the C-plot about the warring groups, for the A-plot about the Enterprise officers response to the ethical choice between orders and the free will of a sentient being or the B-plot about the making of the documentary.

I can’t agree that the episode was too short. The best Trek episodes are tightly rendered and leave lots of room for thought after.

It depends on the populations.

Steppe populations from modern Ukraine easy through to the Urals lived mainly on meat and dairy 5000 years ago (even if they didn’t yet have the lactose tolerance adaptation).

More Prodigy erasure…

🤦🏼‍♀️

I can agree that they’re doing a brilliant job of what they’re doing.

For those of us who’ve been wondering about Pike since The Cage was first put back together and released in the 1980s, it’s been a bit disappointing.

Too much Spock, Uhura, M’Benga and Chapel, not to mention Kirk, too soon rather than a focus on Pike, Number One and the ensemble that preceded Kirk.

I didn’t expect the graphic novel to be able to so accurately capture the voice, tone and humour of the show.

It’s exceptionally good right down to the fine print footnotes on the bottom of several pages.

I had wanted a Pike and Number One focused show but the showrunners and Paramount seem determined to make this show about laying the backstory for TOS.

While I still love the show, I agree that it’s still frustrating that the opportunity to focus more on the unexplored characters.

President of the Federation by all accounts, or past President.

Bakula is pitching a series Star Trek United. It seems everyone’s personal project to revive a character or run a show or movie is coming out of the woodwork.

https://trekmovie.com/2025/08/12/scott-bakula-talks-star-trek-united-producer-reveals-more-details-on-proposed-series/

There’s a discussion thread on this article from a week ago.

I’ve got a rewatch upcoming with my spouse so I’ll take another look at if from that angle.

Perhaps that can help sort out whether the episode might have been handled better by another director.

Interestingly, I find it’s the Trek actors turned directors that manage mixed and shifting tones well. Frakes in directing First Contact, Dawson in directing The Andorian Incident, Robert Duncan McNeill directing Body and Soul are examples.

Yes, I’m not saying she’s not a capable director, but she doesn’t seem to have been the right choice for this episode.

Looking across the distribution of directors used for SNW, as well as Discovery and Picard, there definitely seems to be particular ones that are consistently asked back for specific tones.

Maja Vrvilo directed the season 2 finale Hegemony Pt I and the season 3 one New Life and New Civilizations. In season 1, she directed Children of the Comet.

Jordan Canning directed Charades last season. This season she was given Wedding Bell Blues and Four and a Half Vulcans.

I wasn’t positively impressed by the direction from Valerie Weiss in this episode.

Others have remarked about the tone being all over the map in this episode.

That’s a fair assessment in my view but it’s not a fault in the writing per se. Comic levity in the midst of intense drama goes back to Shakespeare and even Greek theatre, and certainly isn’t uncommon in episodic Trek.

But somehow it felt like the great pieces of the episode just didn’t quite come together. It doesn’t feel like the fault was in the editing or writing.

Paul Wesley’s portrayal of Kirk was excellent but at this point, I’m going to give the actor the credit over the director.

This is just the second episode directed by Weiss. The previous one was Ad Aspra Per Aspera which was a very different challenge for a director. What they needed was a director like Frakes who can do both the comic and the serious.

Discovery became increasingly hopeful and positive as it went on.

Worth watching through season two at least if you haven’t already done so.

I liked seasons three and five a lot.

Season four has a really great classic Trek premise but the constraints of the COVID protocols led to some dialogue that’s over drawn out (Picard season two suffers the same).