Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x09 - "Into the Forest I Go"

[eschaton]

Also, on the subject of ship-to-ship combat. It's always seemed weirdly fake looking in this show, and I haven't been able to figure out why. Almost as if we're looking at models even though it's clearly CGI. I think I figured it out. I think their efforts to make things look more "realistic" by blurring the scenes a bit is making it have a bit of a "tilt shift" effect in places, making the ships look to be smaller than they are supposed to be.

 

[UssGlenn]

It's still unclear if the plans for penetrating all the cloaks got to Starfleet or not. 11 hours is a long time, and considerable time passed between that conversation and the jump. But why put in a delay in transmitting to Starfleet at all if the writers didn't want them to fail to send it.

 

[Long Syntax]

Last episode before the break is sounding good so far, haven't watched it yet will do so tomorrow probably, decided not to read through all the thread to keep some surprise.

IMHO, Discovery so far has been far better than Enterprise ever was.

Just a small point of contention, so I fixed it for you

 

[Mr Awe]

Naah. Masterful manipulators in real life never get caught with having originated an idea. For the audience to catch Lorca doing so would merely establish him as non-masterful...

But saying "The Klingons are coming, oh, no worries, we'll just warp away" is pretty explicit even for the audience.

Yep, exactly! This is manipulation at its best!

 

[Mr Awe]

This is a minor issue, but in retrospect, I hate how the Klingon sarcophagus ship appeared to not move around in space at all. It made me wonder why cracking the cloak was even needed at all, because all the Discovery needed to do was fire a spread of photon torpedoes exactly where it was before it cloaked, and they'd hit it.

That was weird. Maybe just bad editing. Or maybe the Klingons never moved around much while cloaked and everyone assumes they do!

 

[The Memetic Susurrus]

I think that is probably a factor, as well as what I said a little upthread: Lorca is an anti-Picard.
For those who view Picard as the exemplar of what a Star Trek Captain is supposed to be like, Lorca must be very jarring.
Picard has a refined English accent, Lorca a Southern drawl. And for those who sided with Jean Luc in the Picard/Kirk debates, Lorca is even more of a maverick and morally grey than Kirk ever was.
Add to all of that his tendency to be abrasively blunt when he's under pressure, and that just gets some folks inclined to hate him.

Spot-on. I hadn't thought of him in terms of specifically the Anti-Picard, simply that he, unlike Picard in the early seasons, actually appeared to understand that Starfleet had multiple mission-sets, one of which was being Starfleet's NavyCoastGuardNOAA analogue. That and he had no truck with the kind of woolly thinking that appeared to prioritize personal agency over the common good (as Stamets did, prior to his getting a command-directed realignment, what we used to call, tongue-in-cheek, "wall-to-wall counselling").

I always firmly favoured Kirk over Picard so it's somewhat natural to me to gravitate towards Lorca.

Thanks for crystalizing that thought. The idea of Lorca as an Anti-Picard is probably worth unpacking and analysing, as a dramatic device.

 

[Refuge]

After defeating the Ship of the Dead and the cloaking algorithm, Lorca is finally able to see a bit past the war, at least briefly. Previously, his full attention was on winning the war and he wasn't affording himself the luxury of looking past it. He did in this episode and that is what we're seeing. Unless of course it was just to manipulate Stamets to do all those jumps!

Yes, you see Lorca had been secretly constructing a holographic mycelial (sp) network map. He needed Stamets to fill in a few more lines in the grid. Stamets who has lost all sense of self-preservation in part because he's a scientist and seeks out information, and in part because his brain is now like mashed potato, agreed. Throw in a rather clumsy 'one more time' jump, an input from Lorca and he gets to check out just what one of these strands is going to produce. No doubt a parallel universe or a mirror one or a mirror one in a parallel one.

Lorca has been a warrior all along. He's damaged and shouldn't be making command decisions but that's just the way it is. His war efforts have been both useful for the war but also became a means for this other exploration. An exploration that is coming in pretty handy now that he wants a little getaway.

 

[omnirad]

It affected me a lot more emotionally the second time around. Stamets and Culbers "I love you" made me flumox with joy. Burnham's moment of vindication after beaming back from her victory with the Klingons was oh so right. The little look Saru had on the " We went from scientists to fierce warriors." was priceless.
Discovery is a great show.

 

[The Memetic Susurrus]

I don't think people are realizing the true ramifications of this episode. I believe people may be thinking way too small. Forget just visiting the mirror universe, Discovery can travel to pretty much ANY timeline or any parallel universe now. The Kelvin-verse, the mirrorverse, the past, the future.

It's possible this was never the Prime Universe as we knew it to be, but one version of it.

Yeah, I had that thought last night, when I saw people talking about the write-up allegedly leaked to Midnight Edge. The first thing I thought was "Oh boy, they're going to pull the rug out from underneath us at the end of the Season and we'll end up with a slightly reimaged Sixties-era (Kelvinverse-light) Trek..."

Not sure I like that idea, to be honest...

 

[donners22]

Just a small point of contention, so I fixed it for you

The IMHO is implied in any comment on a subjective topic. It would be a waste of time to add it to every post.

We're all expressing our personal opinions here, and nobody is claiming that their views on the quality of the show are objectively right...well, aside from one person in another thread on this board!

Not sure I like that idea, to be honest...

I agree. It feels like pandering to those who bashed the show from the initial announcement.

Goldsman talked up the show as showing how we built towards the future depicted in TOS. That is cheapened if we are not in that universe at all.

 

[Kor]

I don't see why Lorca's map of the spore network was supposed to be this surprise secret. It seems like something they would have been putting together in Stamets' department as SOP.

Kor

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

Lorca: "Mr Stamets, I've got rather a large favour to ask of you."
Stamets: "And what would that be, Captain?"
Lorca: "The Klingon ship of the dead will be arriving here in less than an hour. I intend to kill it."
Stamets: "You want the Klingon ship of the dead, dead?"
Lorca: "Fitting, don't you think? And if we don't kill it, the Klingons will kill us and all those overly helpful whispy blokes on Pahvo. I mean, of course, we'll abandon the Pahvens at the end of the episode like always, but it makes us look heroic until the audience spots the plot hole."
Stamets: "What's the plan, then?"
Lorca: "I intend to send over two highly qualified but eminently untrustworthy, damaged people - one of which is most likely a Klingon sleeper agent, but I'm too busy eating fortune cookies to care - to put noisy sensors on the Klingon ship. Once the Klingons cloak as we're jumping and shooting, I'll need you to make an obscene number of additional jumps to map their cloaking frequency. Then we'll blow the Klingon ship to hell."
Stamets: "Interesting, right up to the obscene number of jumps thingy."
Lorca: "Do you have a better idea?"
Stamets: "Well, I know you hate to be reminded of this, but Discovery was originally a science ship before you turned her into Starfleet's super weapon. And one of the things we were to study was gaseous anomalies. We could refit a dozen photon torpedoes with the gas sensors and let them find the Klingon ship for us. It would be faster and easier than turning my brain into mushroom soup. The thing's gotta have a tailpipe."
Lorca: "Interesting, but it would never work."
Stamets: "Why not?"
Lorca: "It's not nearly enough of a convoluted solution. This is Star Trek, remember? We don't get to do the simple solutions until we're old and beloved. There's a long way to go before that happens. Especially for me. So you get that tailpipe notion out of your head, mister. We're decades away from getting to play that obvious get-out-of-jail-free card."
Stamets: "An obscene number of jumps it is, Captain. What could possibly go wrong?"
Lorca: "Glad you've come around to seeing things my way. Oh, and I'll need you to make one more jump after you nearly burn out. I'll be sure to sabotage it. It'll be fun. Burnham needs a laugh."

 

[Long Syntax]

The IMHO is implied in any comment on a subjective topic. It would be a waste of time to add it to every post.

We're all expressing our personal opinions here, and nobody is claiming that their views on the quality of the show are objectively right...well, aside from one person in another thread on this board!

I've been here long enough to know that's not true - but again, I did say it was only a small point of contention

Oh, and crapping on other ST series is unnecessary - IHMO

 

[cultcross]

Did you notice it wasn't the UK?

Not sure what you're referring to but if you mean the board, actually it is in the UK, if you mean the show's universe, well it's not America either, so different human cultural viewpoints make for an interesting discussion. Especially if we are going to call out the show for using or not using particular language.

 

[ozzfloyd]

Even more than ENT S4 (minus TATV) ?

Imo yes.

 

[ladyofshalott]

maybe there was something wrong at star base 46, he seemed sceptical at the last comment: i look forward to congratulate you in person

 

[The Memetic Susurrus]

I really, really don't like the idea that Lorca is "Mirror Lorca" - both because he doesn't seem to be irredeemably evil, and because Trek said canonically that people from the Mirror Universe (at least during this time period) were such barbarians that they would never be able to pretend to fit in. But here's some alternate ideas.

1. He's indeed from an alternate universe, but not an evil one, just a slightly more crapsack one. He somehow materialized when the real Lorca's ship was destroyed with Lorca "prime" still onboard, and took over his identity, which explains why he doesn't have a good explanation of how he survived when his whole crew went down.

2. Alternately, he is prime Lorca, and he's being driven by the idea he can find an alternate universe which didn't result in the destruction of his first ship and the loss of the crew.

I like both ideas, though #2 would be a great riposte to all the "Lorca Is An Evil WHHHHHHAARMOOOONGER!!!" bovine faeces.

 

[The Memetic Susurrus]

Except in Starfleet (TNG, at least), any time you have to resort to fighting, you have automatically failed in your mission's peaceful intent.

One of the things I absolutely despised about early NG era was Picard's insistence that humanity had "evolved," etc., etc.

Yes, that's why you still carry photon torpedoes and phasers...



I get that some think that's charmingly idealistic, but...it seems a tad unrealistic.

 

[Jax]

Yes, that's why you still carry photon torpedoes and phasers...

For pure defensive reasons, his point was clearly Humanity no longer are the aggressives and seek violence as the first option to any situation.

 

[mswood]

I dont understand why people are complaining about Stamets offer of one more jump. He has a great motivation to jump to safety, and one worth the risk of his life.

Not only the risk of incoming Klingon ships getting the ship, its drive, and general concern for crew, he also has someone he loves. That can be an extremely powerful morivator .

Even with the risk to ship, crew, and tech that could harm the Federation for myself personal love be it towards parent, child or lover would be a bigger factor.