Startrek Discovery Ep 1

[jack]

Ooh, as several people said, I like the characters. First ep set up the bridge crew very well.

And nicely diverse main characters, both in terms of aliens, and human races and gender expressions. We'll have to see if the background characters live up to that.

Startrek Producer 1: Hey, we did a great job with diversity. We exceeded our target with the federation crew!
Startrek Producer 2: Don't worry. We can make up for it by making super racist klingons.

WTF? Was there some sort of fight behind the scenes, where one person designed a diverse progressive federation, and the other went wild loading negative stereotypes on klingons? They'll be like orcs, but uglier. And really dark, more black the more evil they are. And all men, we don't need to show any women. And they won't have anything to DO, or even living quarters, they'll just stand around arguing about death and honour.

Even if you decide to show the Klingon society as repressive and regressive, you could show female klingon characters! Presumably they exist somewhere. Judging from these scenes, they do all the actual work. And presumably they have opinions whether blah blah blah prophecy blah blah death honour mutilation war blah or not.

Vulcan upbringing. Yes! Although can we as a society PLEASE FUCKING MOVE PAST SHOWING SMART CHARACTERS ESTIMATING THINGS TO THREE DECIMAL PLACES?

And I could do with less, "stop having emotions". Yes, Vulcans endlessly spend their lives telling humans to stop having emotions. Even though they know it's futile. Why do they keep doing it?

I'm sure it broke continuity in lots of ways even if you buy into the time travel premise, but I don't care, I care whether it felt right and followed stayed consistent to itself, and it mostly seemed to. It *felt* right. All the ship, and decorations and uniforms, and space suits, and so on.

It was mostly blessedly free of the recent films J J Abrams notion that time and space are infinitely malleable and characters leap between scenes on opposite sides of the galaxy one minute and then spend hours traversing a single system the next. I hadn't considered "there's a sense of different locations being in different places to each other, and taking time to travel between" as a plus point for a tv show before, but apparently you can't take it for granted.

Except possibly the beacon thing. All those ships it summoned, from how far away? And it was really bright, but given how fast people "saw" it, was it beaconing in visible light? Or sublight? Or something else?

I am mildly suspicious of hologram-admiral-phone. But being able to talk to the admiralty sometimes but not others, and not have them just command all the starships from earth, is in the longest traditions of startrek, so there's not a lot to say. Just don't overdo it.

And, eek. I hope they're all ok!

When I first saw the title, I thought, "is that a sex act? or like a glasgow kiss?" I hadn't expected to be right.

Comments

[conuly]

And I could do with less, "stop having emotions". Yes, Vulcans endlessly spend their lives telling humans to stop having emotions. Even though they know it's futile. Why do they keep doing it?

Because Vulcans are afflicted with the sin of pride. Which is an emotion, but don't tell them. (Also, don't tell them that being unemotional is not the same as being rational. They can't take it, poor dears.)

[ghoti_mhic_uait]

I don't have any thoughts because I'm still somewhere in TOS, but I wanted to mention that the episode title is 'The Vulcan Hello'.

[mtbc]

I liked it. Regarding the beacon thing, it did at some point make some 2d intensity graph on a computer display wobble on the bridge, which they explained with some accompanying technobabble, which I took to mean that maybe it could signal faster than the speed of light. They probably mentioned subspace, that's the usual. For me the one-dimensionality of the Klingons was the worst aspect.

[ptc24]

I wasn't particularly impressed, but it seems that opinions vary. At some point I said to my flatmate, "you know how some things are some other thing with the serial numbers filed on, this is like something non-Trek with Trek serial numbers written on with a Sharpie[1]".

The whole initial two-parter felt oddly like a film, it's hard to say how. The weird camera angles were jarring, as was the sharp deceleration from warp. Evidently also latter-day Trek takes the whole "the future is bright" maxim and interprets it as a demand for massive amounts of lens flare.

I have a theory about the New Klingons. I have this concept of "cultural self-confidence", which I want to expound on at some point when I have the self-confidence myself. TOS-to-DS9 era Klingons had lots of it, Discovery Klingons are showing all the signs of having lost theirs. It makes you wonder what terrible thing the Federation did to them. Reading some of the stuff on Wikipedia, "The values and designs of the Federation were updated for the series, but were expected to evolve towards those of the original series throughout Discovery's run." and "There's a tremendous amount of conflict in [the original series] and there's a lot of, sort of, aspirations towards the ideals of the Federation, and then we sort of made the prime directive just to break it, apparently. So part of what we've tried to do is speak to how those philosophical precepts came to be."

So, if my speculation is right, expect fascinating reflections on the origin/significance of the Prime Directive if we're lucky, large amounts of angst if we're unlucky, and sort-of-interesting-but-annoyingly-angsty reflections on the origin/significance of the Prime Directive if we're somewhere in-between.

[1] OK, I refined my metaphor a bit after saying it, spirit of the staircase and all that.

[mtbc]

felt oddly like a film — I think that part of it might be that it looked very much like they had a decent special effects budget. We'll see if it lasts.