williams_482 @ williams_482 @startrek.website

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That's actually an excellent point with early Discovery, a connection which had not occured to me despite working on this morning's post. Discovery absolutely does try to do this, and for the most part it works; it only really falls apart when the show shifts to extremely grandiose storylines and feels the need to put Burnham in the middle of all of them. The early goings, essentially a war story told from the perspective of some science specialists who really ought to be the ones in the middle of those situations, makes considerable sense.

(Continuing in the comments...)

Even the ultimately disposable characters got real development. Prime Georgeou is the most obvious example: dead after two episodes, and yet there is no question in a viewer's mind as to why she's such a highly regarded captain, why Burnham is so affected by her loss, or why Saru feels so hurt to have been robbed of a chance to learn under her. But even the redshirts got a decent look.

Ensign Connor is just another guy at a console on board the Shenzhou. His ultimate fate is to have that console blow up in his face and then get shot into space, all of which happens in the show's opening two parter. And yet somehow, he gets more effective sympathetic characterization than any bridge crewer on Discovery, with the possible exception of Ariam's brazenly telegraphed pre-death sob story.

Amidst the preparation for Burnham's spacewalk, a simple pre-chaos demonstration of what this starship and this crew look like executing relatively routine tasks, Connor is the one charged with coordinating between Burnham and the bridge. He does so in a delightfully charming manner:

Commander Burnham, this is Ensign Danby Connor. On behalf of Captain Georgiou and the entire crew of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, we'd like to welcome you to flight 819 with non-stop service to the object of unknown origin. The temperature outside is a brisk minus-260 degrees Celsius. We are forecasting some mild debris, but anticipate a smooth ride.

Pleasant and humorous, maybe a little loose by modern military standards, but not unprofessional or disruptive. I already like this guy!

40 minutes later, we're at war. Connor's console blows up in his face, and he staggers off to sickbay but gets lost, winding up outside Burnham's cell. Delirious, he asks several jumbled questions, culminating in this:

Why are we fighting? We're Starfleet. We're explorers, not soldiers.

It's a touch on the nose, perhaps, but Sam Vartholomeos sells it pretty well: genuine distress, from a man robbed of his filter by severe trauma. You can't help but feel bad for the guy.

And then blam, he's sucked out into hard vacuum. Ouch.

Compare this to the the Bridge crew on Discovery come S3. We've had an awful lot of time to get to know Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Nillson, Bryce, etc, but it's somehow never happened. We know Rhys tried to kiss Tilly at the party in Magics, we know Detmer is proud of her piloting skills, Owo grew up in a non-believer luddite colony, and those last two seem to get along pretty well, but that's basically it. As a result, when these characters are all tossed into an allegedly doomed circumstance in the season 3 finale, we have basically no emotional connection with them and only barely care about their sacrifice, or alternately their Deus Ex Machina salvation.

To give them some credit, the writers did make one real attempt to make people from these cardboard cutouts. The closing scene from 3x03 People of Earth features the above five plus Tilly going down to earth to see a tree on the Starfleet Academy grounds.

In theory, this seems like an appropriate scene and a decent way to give these guys a little characterization, but in practice it feels flat. The actors (with the exception of Wiseman, who actually moves around) seem like they don't really know what to do, and just wind up either sitting or standing around awkwardly. Dialogue is brief, clipped, betraying nothing particularly personable. I admit I lack the expertise to tell if the problem is in the script, direction, or the actors themselves, but at least one of those things needed to change. Compared to Connor's lightning likability, this is a weak effort.

Early Discovery was willing to tackle difficult topics

There is a major missed opportunity in transition from early S1 to the subsequent efforts: the decision to handwave off or outright discard the tougher questions represented by Lorca and Tyler.

Lorca is presented as a military man through and through: a well studied pragmatist and a harsh but effective motivator, cognizant of the demands of war and willing to do what he judged best to protect his country. This is a kind of person Star Trek rarely attempts to portray, and even more rarely in a positive light. I've read quite a few accounts from people with military backgrounds who were quite fond of this character, finally shown a captain who thought the way they'd been trained to.

The idea that a nation of Chamberlain's might occasionally need a Churchill is hardly a novel one, and given the surprising popularity of Section 31, it's not exactly a controversial take even among Star Trek fans. But actually keeping character like Lorca around gives the freedom to poke and prod at the boundaries of where morality and military necessity overlap, and the show is under no obligation to present him as definitively good or definitively bad.

Even better, Lorca is an excellent avenue to explore trauma. Blindly grafting everything we see in these first nine episodes (except the MU jump itself, and Lorca's bizare protectiveness of Burnham) onto the genuine article Lorca instead of his mustache twirling counterpart from the evil dimension, we get a nearly broken man defined by his pain, plagued by memory of the crew he not only lost, but felt duty bound to pull the plug on. He is desperate to keep himself in the big chair and doing what must be done to save the Federation from an existential threat, and willing to fall into a rabbit hole of deceptions to do it. How far can he keep that up? At what point would he break down? And can his efforts ever really be justified?

But that disappointment comes a cold second to Ash Tyler. There's hardly a surplus of honest, serious stories about male rape victims these days, which is a reason of it's own not to shy from examining this one. But the story we got of a POW who survived seven months in a Klingon prison by encouraging otherwise unwanted advances from his captor is uniquely horrifying, and the portrayal bears that out in full force. Tyler going into shock upon seeing L'Rell again is evocative, and the flashbacks we see are horrific to the point that I found them genuinely uncomfortable. His dialogue with Burnham at the end of Into the Forest I Go is heart wrenching:

BURNHAM: I need to know something. You put on a facade. Like everything that's happened to you just washes off. I actually envied that about you. But when you saw that Klingon... Who is she to you?
TYLER: I think you already know.
BURNHAM: You were her prisoner.
TYLER: Yeah. Her name's L'Rell. She's the reason I've had nightmares... every night since Captain Lorca and I fled her ship. She's also the only reason I'm still alive. Two hundred and twenty-seven days. But it only took one to realize I wasn't gonna make it out alive, not unless I made a choice.
BURNHAM: What did you do?
TYLER: I survived. That... That Klingon... was more than just my captor. She was my torturer. One who took a particular... interest in me. And I saw a way out. A way to live past day one, day ten, day 20, day 97... I encouraged it. Her sick affections. Her obsession with me. Because if I hadn't, I'd be dead, like all the others. And I got out. I get to keep living my life. But the thing is... if none of that had happened, I wouldn't be here. On this ship. With you. And that almost makes it... worth it. Is that weird?
BURNHAM: No. I'm glad you're here, too. You get to live your life, the way you deserve to. Not at war... but at peace.
TYLER: I found peace. Right here.

In the real world, these are not situations that resolve cleanly. There is a road ahead for a real Tyler, but it's a long and hard one, laden with complexities I'm unqualified to describe. Star Trek has a long history of touching on these sorts of issues, but by and large the resolutions amounted to a few words of wisdom before warping out of the system and moving on to next week's quandary. Discovery as a genuinely serialized modern story was well positioned to buck that trend and really dig into these sorts of difficult topics, and the show's opening acts left them well positioned to do that. That this emotionally charged setup was crafted essentially by accident as cover to bust out two different varieties of villain in disguise is a tragedy all of it's own.

Those two are of course the most emotionally charged examples, but they certainly aren't the only places where the show tackles some classically Trek plots. Chief among them is the Tardigrade, which in a mere three episodes plays the part of a monster, the surprising final piece in a wondrous machine, and a terrified victim whose suffering and very survival is weighed against the lives of the crew. Quite the slate of roles out of a guest star alien who doesn't talk.

All in all, Discovery's opening act was a well planned, well executed example of serialized storytelling which still embraced the kinds of moral choices and emotional struggles which have been a Star Trek staple since the beginning. Somehow, it manages to be closer to both classic Trek and to the prestige serialized shows that became so popular in the last 15 years (and were commonly requested before Discovery was ever on the drawing board) than any of the subsequent live action efforts we've seen. It represents an approach to Star Trek that was cut off far too early, one that solves or avoids the most obnoxious pitfalls of the later seasons, and one I desperately wish we could have gotten more of.

Yeah, I guess my problem isn't knowing the destination, it's knowing that the destination is going to be pretty rough in ways that run counter to this show's general vibe. Which really is pretty similar to my broader frustrations with Discovery's "the distant future includes 120 years of horrific geopolitical strife where basically everything your heroes fought for falls apart". I really want to believe in the happy ending, you know? Even when the concept of an ending doesn't actually make real-world sense.

As with many other posters here, I was not a fan of the "get juiced up and fight Klingons" scenes, from basically any angle. I didn't really care for the fight scene in general, and the stimulant stuff just seems whacky.

However, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here, because this sort of thing is not totally foreign to Star Trek: in Amok Time, McCoy gives Kirk an injection of something which allows him to temporarily match Spock's strength and fighting ability. It's one of the many, many "well why don't they always do that?" Things that pops up in Trek and in TOS especially, and my hope is that the long term plan here is to settle that question. Perhaps this thing has some truly nasty side effects, or it's extremely addictive; in any case there's plenty of reason not to make it standard or even permissible gear.

Branching slightly from there, it's remarkable how much sketchy stuff doctor M'benga has already been involved in. First keeping his child in the transporter buffer and then releasing her to live in a cloud, now revealing that he keeps vials of hulk drugs about his person at all times. There's plenty of grounds here for us to surmise why he is no longer a CMO when he shows up in TOS.

Which leads to the third point that's beginning to worry me about this show: we're seeing a number of character arcs which we already know the ultimate resolution to, and it's not the resolution that I find myself rooting for as I watch these characters. Spock and Chapel definitely don't wind up together; Spock and Chapel both become much more emotionally withdrawn; M'benga gets himself demoted; T'Pring finds a flagrantly sociopathic way out of her relationship with Spock. And,obviously, Pike suffers his horrific accident. It's a pretty depressing slate of events inevitable occurring to a number of characters who I didn't care about all that much before this show (excepting Spock, obviously) and have come to really enjoy watching here.

The "well we know they won't die" is an often cited rebuke for why prequels with classic characters aren't always a great idea, but "we know the general arc of their lives" is arguably more impactful. Most characters don't die during their shows, and if the writing and acting is good enough I won't care that an outcome is preordained while I'm watching. But knowing that storylines I am emotionally invested in are doomed to end badly hits me at times when I can and will actually think about it, and It's really not a good mix with what should fundamentally be an optimistic show.

David Collins does some really awesome musical analysis. In one of his earliest episodes of this show he went over the TMP/TNG theme and suggested that it is a deliberate musical representation on the theme of boldly going from a difficult past into a bright future. Fantastic stuff.

It seems a bit Earth-centric and 21st century to think that Federation politics would have a similar kind of left-right political spectrum, let alone the definitions of them being more American than representative of what the political spectrum might be like elsewhere.

I suspect that "liberal" and "conservative" going to be pretty standard political splits even in a distant future; not in any way particularly reminiscent of their current manifestations in American/global politics, but in the way different people answer a more fundamental question: do we stick with what works, or continue to push the boundaries?

"We should let people augment themselves without consequence" is a very liberal position. It endorses experimentation beyond the current status quo, emphasizing an ideal (personal liberty) above specific practical considerations. "We should prevent people from augmenting themselves or their children except to correct for specific disabilities" is a fundamentally conservative position: it endorses sticking with the status quo, sacrificing an idealistic possibility that comes with uncertainty and risk for the security of what has worked well for a long time.

We see noticeable breakdowns along these lines for older/younger siblings, for example, and between generations at different points in their lives. For humans, at least, risk tolerance seems to be one of the major things that separates how we think about issues, and it's something I would fully expect to continue to divide people even if/when we finally get ourselves sorted on the big issues of today.

Welcome aboard, Lieutenant!

Right now, 100% of it (and then some) is going into server costs, which are scaling up much faster than we anticipated (which is awesome, because it means there are more of you coming faster than we anticipated!). We aren't publishing details on that right now, but the plan in the medium to long term is to set up an official nonprofit and put out financial statements for anyone curious to check out. We have seen other Lemmy/Mastodon instances do the same thing.

I would be flabbergasted (in a good way!) if we somehow wound up sustainably pulling in more money than the site costs to run, but we will lay out a formal plan for that scenario which doesn't involve pocketing the excess for ourselves.

Welcome aboard Algernon! It's a pleasure to see your username in Daystrom again.

It looks like M-5 is hard at work archiving posts. Is it grabbing old PoTWs or working off some other criteria?

Currently the criteria is "was it on the wiki and did someone message Reddit modmail asking for it (or something closely related to it)". So M-5 isn't actually working very hard at all at the moment, but that can change!

We don't currently plan to repost things that other put on Daystrom's main site, but we do encourage people to repost things they were proud of from their own comment history if they feel so inclined. We intend to reopen the site in read-only mode before too much longer, which should make that process easier, and in the long run we'd like to put together some kind of comprehensive off-site archive with proper credit given to submitters. Alternately, if there's something from the wiki you would like to see preserved here, let us know and M-5 will set to work on it.

That's definitely an angle which could have been taken, and (like a number of other unused areas to explore about a nominally sexless, amorphous being) probably would have been considered seriously if DS9 were coming out today.

With that said, I'm not surprised Odo chose to remain as he was. Odo is accustomed to being able to change himself... temporarily. He's never been stuck in any one form before, so it makes tremendous sense that 1) he'd be relatively risk adverse about making changes which he expects would be far less trivial to revert, and 2) he'd want to make sure he kept the shape that he usually holds, which everyone else recognizes as him. For Odo, his shape-changing ability is first and foremost a tool, and although he's willing to play around with it in relative private and in small doses, he clearly isn't interested in making himself any ostentatious features or he would have been doing that already.

There is a whole lot of love love for ShittyDaystrom on this mod team, so no worries. It'll be here!

We expect to expand our communities as we gain more users, so there likely will be an equivalent space on here eventually. In the mean time, though, I encourage you to meme it up on /c/risa!

A friend of mine also speculates that the new shows have an even harder time with character development than older shows, because they have far fewer episodes per season. When you have 10-15 episodes (instead of say, 26), and you limit character development to snippets in the middle of action, well, then you get Star Trek: Discovery’s tendency to annoy long-time fans.

This is one of the areas where Season 1 nailed it, and the subsequent writers/showrunners couldn't seem to figure out how to replicate the formula. The first season gave significant time to heavy, emotional moments where characters talked about their feelings, but they were either outside of high pressure, time sensitive situations (like Tyler telling Burnham about what L'Rell did to him), or they are fundamentally a part of those high pressure time sensitive situations and the emotional issues becomes an additional hurdle to clear (like earlier in the same episode when Tyler has a massive PTSD episode upon seeing L'Rell aboard the Ship of the Dead). Both scenes are well done, powerful moments.

This is a stark contrast from, for example, the conversation between Spock and Burnham at the end of the S2 finale. Both characters are awake, alert, sober, stable, and well aware that there is a vitally important time sensitive task which must be done quickly; every moment of delay means more people die in the battle raging around them, and a greater chance of the plan being disrupted by something. And yet, Spock and Burnham take a minute for a tearful goodbye before actually doing what they were supposed to. That's annoying to the audience and wildly irresponsible for the characters. Both run counter to the emotions the writers are trying to evoke, and neither would have been an issue if this conversation had been worked into an earlier part of the episode.

I was pretty surprised to learn that the Bashir augment backstory was an off the cuff idea and Alexander Sidig wasn't informed of it ahead of the episode. It seemed like it fit right in with what we had seen from Bashir already, especially the utterly bizarre tour of his brain which we got in S3E18 Distant Voices. Conversations with the alien entity digging around in there make clear that many of Bashir's self proclaimed failures were a result of him intentionally tanking, but for the infamous pre-ganglionic nerve vs post-ganglionic fiber final exam mixup, it's not obvious why Bashir did it. Clearly the writers had something in the works there.

This is a marked distinction from changeling!Bashir being unrevealed to the actor until the episode where his status became relevant. The episode about the baby changeling especially gets very weird with that context, and it feels like the writers hadn't planned things out quite as well as they usually did with that sequence.

I guess that could work if the holosuites either project a simulation of people/foreign objects once they get farther away in the simulation than in reality. Or, if it can do some really clever lensing magic with force fields to make the real world people and objects seem closer or further? That's plausible, and maximizes the "reality" of what people are seeing.

This is terrible, horrible, and awful, so naturally it's a perfect fit.

Welcome aboard, it seems you'll do fine here.

Welcome aboard, Commander!

Yeah, well, other than that he was great!