Star Trek

I watch discovery for the character drama and space battles but it's still jarring for a show set on a SCIENCE vessel to revolve around a propulsion system that you'd see in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Edited by The_MJP on Feb 23rd 2021 at 11:56:50 AM

I'm catching up on the show cause I'm late to the party but Saru and Lorca are my favorite characters so far

Edited by The_MJP on Feb 23rd 2021 at 11:57:59 AM

An interesting comparison is Legends of Tomorrow that tried taking a Star Trek meets Comic Book Time Traveling concept, which fared horribly in the first season in terms of keeping the mechanics straight and managed to gain much more success in later seasons by just saying "They can travel through time and have adventures" because they leaned into what worked (Powered Armor in Feudal Japan, Mind Control helmets in Camelot).

Star Trek at least tries to be a little more philosophical at its core.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Feb 23rd 2021 at 11:23:59 AM

Thing with the spore drive is, there have been equally ridiculous pieces of science in Star Trek before, but those bits of bogus science generally only appeared in a single episode and were never mentioned again, while the spore drive was made a fundamental part of the show that's constantly referenced.

Imagine if going Warp 10 in order to hyper-evolve into different animals was a regular thing on Voyager?

Speaking of dumb, I was enjoying Season 3 of Discovery more than the first two, but then we found out the origin of the burn, and it's that a Kelpian screamed one time, and that made every warp drive that was in use explode. It's not even that he was upset enough about something and that he psychically set off the burn in a moment of distress, it was specifically that he made a loud noise. Like, if it was a Q or other powerful being, or some experiment, I'd be okay with, but what we got makes no sense.

Isn't it? That was totally the impression I got. They talk about the exposure to the massive surrounding dilithium radiation in the womb somehow connecting him to it, as well as that being how he survived that same radiation all these decades later.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 24th 2021 at 2:01:51 AM

I don't know. A psychic connection should make more sense, but it seems to be more based on the fact that there is a scream, and how loud it is, more than how upset he is. Actually it may not be that he's "upset," it may be specifically that he's afraid, or something more precise.

Edited by WillKeaton on Feb 24th 2021 at 2:22:03 AM

It seemed like a case of Emotional Powers in an adult with the emotional maturity of a child, hence the need to get him to confront his trauma safely so he could start to move past it so it wouldn't happen again, but it was all kind of magical in a way so I suppose they could've been wrong about that? I admit I was hoping for a more scientific/intrigue-based explanation for the Burn. But we got some good performances and some cool visual effects out of it.

It did feel Trek-ish to me in the sense that it was all about talking things out and solving the puzzle, even if it wasn't quite the season-ending bang I might've liked for this series in particular. But assuming they follow up on it next season, I'm willing to see where this goes.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 24th 2021 at 3:51:14 AM

Think they'll undo the burn so they can return to a more status quo Star Trek in the future? Or maybe just introduce a new technobabble alternative or fix to warp that effectively does the same thing.

Regarding The Burn, if I recall correctly, they indicated that exposure to all that dilithium in the womb, combined with the fact that dilithium has a subspace component, gave him some contact with both dilithium and subspace.

Regarding the scream, my interpretation is that it was less the vocalisation than that the same emotions that drove the vocalisation drove the character's altered physiology to vent in another manner, consonant with its abilities.

As to the spore drive... I've really never had much trouble with it. In fact, I rather like it.

As to fitting with the setting, it doesn't seem all that far from the general scientific "hardness" of the setting, to me.

And in any case, I leave a lot of room for "stuff that we haven't discovered".

Indeed, if there's some alternate plane to the universe, why might it not have its own form of life?

It's weird, of course, that said life is fungal—a type of life that originated on Earth. But then, this is a series in which a wide variety of distantly separate planets have remarkably similar-looking sentient species—and more than that, species that can interbreed somehow.

Overall, I've been thoroughly enjoying Discovery, from season 1 all through to the end of season 3 thus far.

They ended the season shipping out dilithium from the hidden planet, as I recall. So I imagine that they might start the next season with a slow rebuilding, as dilithium is disseminated little by little and more and more ship can move with some degree of freedom.

Edited by ArsThaumaturgis on Feb 24th 2021 at 11:52:34 AM

The idea of the spore drive and tardigrades could still make for some interesting sci-fi, but after Fuller left I guess the other writers didn't really know where he was going with it so it just comes across as "mushroom engine" and "giant worm monster". But the idea of fungi as this very different form of life (so maybe they were going to play the panspermia card, do a riff on the not-Founder from TNG's The Chase/the Engineer from Prometheus, worlds seeded by ancient precursors), the unclear mechanism (maybe more unclear at the time of writing?) by which fungal networks seem to sense and reach out to each other (in the fiction, across interstellar distances, as tendrils of this extradimensional lifeform), that's compelling. And the idea of tardigrades as tiny little astronauts is of course very appealing, given their ability to vacuum-seal their cells and come back to life after decades — even after being exposed to the vacuum of space, as astronauts have discovered. Maybe work in some size-shifting shenanigans, "The universe is expanding, and that includes our atoms (Hand Wave)." I don't know. I'm neither a scientist nor a writer on the series.

But I do think the *ideas* were interesting, and perhaps they could have made something that sustained suspension of disbelief and felt somewhat more plausible. They just dropped the concept after a certain point, in favour of something more conventional. I don't necessarily blame them for that, and at this point it's worked out, but it does leave that early subplot and the actual mechanics of spore drive travel as something of an Artifact.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 24th 2021 at 3:31:35 AM

Well, it's hardly the first time a Star Trek show has had Early-Installment Weirdness.

The series has always looked good, had a good cast, and underneath the early grittiness there was a certain core of optimism. They've found their footing tonally and have figured out the crew dynamic, how it differs from other ships in the franchise. I'm looking forward to what they do next.

Let's just hope it doesn't go like Enterprise and get cancelled right as it starts getting really good.

Let's hope.

Weren't you aware? It got canceled four seasons ago.

We got a "first look" at Prodigy today apparently, but it's just a reveal of the designs of the core characters they'll be originating (not Janeway) and the announcement that the show is going to be on Paramount+, which surprised me a bit since it's a Nickelodeon show until I realized that Nickelodeon is a Paramount brand.

Reposting my post regarding Prodigy:

Here's our first look at the crew, which will notably not include a completely human character.

Also, the active Viacom Investor Event briefly had Kurtzman narrate over his "Star Trek Universe" initiative, including some clips of "Strange New Worlds" which should be up on other sites soon enough.

Edited by XMenMutant22 on Feb 24th 2021 at 7:57:59 AM

I guess it makes sense- An animated show wouldn't need to deal with the budget constraints that lead to Rubber-Forehead Aliens, after all.

I do quite like the idea of Starfleet as seen through the eyes of alien children, and it's good to see an animated series taking full advantage of the medium. I'm pretty happy Janeway's getting another shot, too, for that matter.

Here's an upload of the Kurtzman narrated Star Trek Universe promotion from Paramount Plus featured at the Viacom Investor Event:

It's a good tone they're striking, the emphasis on hope and coming together, exploration and adventure. Feels like a very fragile thing at the moment, like taking those first steps all over again even though this franchise is fifty years old and Discovery is in its fourth season, but that's okay. Star Trek of all things should be ambitious.

Yeah, I really liked S3 of DISC, but the ending reaally pushed the technobabble barrier. Sometimes less explanation is better. The Person of Mass Destruction isn't really inconsistent with beings we've seen before; Charlie X for example.

The spore drive was probably conceived as a Literal Metaphor for the way fungi can be gigantic organisms with parts poking above ground miles apart.

Edited by alanh on Feb 24th 2021 at 8:35:28 AM

I feel that the origin of the Burn would have felt more at home in Doctor Who.

True. The vague excuse to have everyone appear as different aliens for no real reason, the metaphorical landscape of the holo-simulation, the need to comfort what amounted to a child whose trauma created a real-world disaster through no fault of their own... it does all feel like a repurposed Who script.

Edited by Unsung on Feb 24th 2021 at 8:38:45 AM