So many interesting thoughts on this one... both thoughts of my own, and those shared by others! Hope nobody minds a long-ish rambling post... ;-)
This show is definitely trying hard to be the 'Game Of Thrones' version of Star Trek. The influences are strong. Mixed in with a push on left wing politics. Voq/Tyler at war with himself seems to be the most perfect analogy for the series and it's direction.
I'd agree that the show seems in conflict with itself sometimes. I'm not sure where exactly you see any "left-wing politics," though... at least, not any more than the ways Trek has always has always been built around liberal themes. If anything, with its explicitly war-based setting, DSC has diverged from that more than past series.
Agree. it's not cannibalism when you eat another species. ... it's like when Voq ate Phillipa, not cannibalism. Still gross, but serves a point in the story. The hatred for another species is real. Human beings have done similar vile things to each other in history when they see others as less than human.
I'd have to agree with the posters who say that when you're talking about another sentient (indeed humanoid!) species, the distinction is meaningless. You may be correct strictly as a matter of semantics, but even there, I'd expect a future society like Trek's, chock-full of sentient humanoids, to expand the meaning of "cannibalism" to encompass all of them. What makes it grotesque isn't the idea of eating a member of one's own species per se, after all, it's the idea of eating a self-aware thinking being.
I'm skeptical, though (as I was with the earlier bit concerning the Klingon's treatment of Georgiou's corpse) that it served any point in the story. It merely hammered home that the perpetrators adhere to an alien set of values, which was already clear enough without being quite so gross about it.
He was her father figure who per the Emperor had watched her grow up... That’s Woody Allen type shit there. It’s Predatory and oh yeah, I’ll take the Emperor over that any day
Nothing the Emperor said described MU-Lorca being "predatory," much less a child-molester; you're reading that in, and IMHO overreacting. In context, in an MU where people obviously use sex as a means to cement alliances and manipulate others all the time (much like ancient and medieval human societies), honestly it sounds downright bland.
At any rate, as to your choice of analogy... .if my choices for who to trust to run my society come down to (A) incredibly talented, multiple-Oscar-winning filmmaker with a much younger (but consenting adult) wife, or (B) mass-murdering, cannibalistic, fascist psychopath? Umm, I'll take "A" every time.
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A key difference is that GoT has revenge fantasy as a huge part of its' plotline. Ned Stark is killed, and story arcs are created for his offspring to seek revenge. People keep watching GoT so that they can see hated enemies that killed characters they love also get killed.
I agree that Lorca is a huge draw for the show, mainly because of Jason Isaacs' layered acting. (It's not as if the character's been written all that consistently, after all.) I'm thrown by your
GOT analogy, though. Sure, many of the
characters in that show are driven by the desire for revenge. But the
viewers? I certainly don't watch it out of an urge to see the death of hateful characters, and I'd hope others don't either!...
Honestly the bigger twist would have honestly been if Burnham came to the conclusion that he is Mirror Universe, and then Lorca's reply to the guard/captain guy he's knocked out is "I have no idea who your sister is" showing it all to be a massive red herring that even Burnham fell for. Lorca is SO MUCH more interesting as a PTSD riddled morally grey War veteran than he is a Mirror Universe character.
...I also LOVE how literally episode after episode building up Voq/Tyler, it literally gets solved in what, 3 minutes of screen time since the reveal? Absolutely hilarious. What hacks.
On the first point, yeah, that would've been an impressive double-fake-out. Can't really fault the writers for following through on their own foreshadowed intentions, though. There are more important goals than surprising the viewers.
On the second point, I agree completely. Unless there's (a lot) more to it, the whole Tyler/Voq plot will wind up looking like nothing but a massively drawn-out red herring.
[RD Moore] knows Trek, he can write, he understands how to build flawed, compelling characters, and he is a successful showrunner. What more could you ask for?
That (A) he turned the Klingons into downright boring, one-note caricatures (although granted they don't look so bad compared to the ones on DSC) and (B) he failed the landing so hard in the godawful 4th season of nuBSG that it completely undermined my appreciation for what went before.
I'm watching the BSG reboot for the first time right now, and the contrast between the two series is stark, because I really do care about the characters and their development there - right from the beginning. Discovery leaves me feeling nothing for any of the characters. I watch from week to week only to find out how they're going to end this whole thing.
You're just watching it now? Okay, without spoiling anything, I'll give you this... prior to S4, nuBSG was some excellent television... especially S3, IMHO... and it did indeed do some fascinating character development. However, I always thought it succeeded more as an extended
political allegory than as actual SF. It was never big on consistent worldbuilding, and taken at face value, a lot of its SF-nal concepts were sheer nonsense right from the start.
I would love to know what happened in the making of this season. I suspect it wasn't pretty. It really does look like some blind alleys were visited and abandoned. Hopefully Season 2 will have some coherance that Season 1 didn't. I still think it's the strongest first season any trek show has ever had.
Hear, hear on every part of this... except that final sentence. Specifically, I'd hope you're not including the original
Star Trek in that comparison of "any trek show"?... It's in a class by itself.
There is no redemption [for Burnham] in my estimation. ... But, that's just me and I freely admit others think differently. My career in the military and my continued work as a civil servant, of necessity, colours, informs, and shapes my judgement. In my eyes, she is completely unredeemable. ... She is fatally flawed and I lay that entirely on the heads of a writers group who appear to have absolutely no understanding of how chains of command, esprit d'corps, or military (or, if you insist, quasi-military) structures actually work.
...The viewing public has absolutely no comprehension of the profession of arms. And, so too, the writers. And so we get this. When the normal actions of a wartime commander are considered "fascist." That tells me more about the writers and the viewing public than it does about the characters.
I've been puzzled by your comments along these lines earlier in the season, and I still am. It helps to know you acknowledge your perspective is shaded by your own military experience, but even so, Burnham's crimes don't seem any less forgivable than those of other familiar Starfleet officers in any number of past stories.
Moreover, one of the appealing things to me about Trek has always been that it's
not particularly militaristic, notwithstanding Starfleet's use of naval ranks. I really wouldn't enjoy a show about a rigidly hierarchical, militaristic future... certainly it wouldn't seem at all utopian. To me, Starfleet seems more like the kind of organization that makes room for (and use of) everyone's talents and passions, the kind that embodies the ideals of a society built around peace, diplomacy, exploration, and research. From TOS forward, "chain of command" has always been a concept honored as much in the breach as in the observance. When push came to shove in a crisis, for instance, everyone understood that Kirk was responsible for making the final decisions, but that never stopped, say, McCoy from expressing his own passionate opinions right up to that point.
(For the same reasons, I just can't grasp your argument that Stamets was being "insubordinate" to Lorca way back in episode 3 and deserved the dressing-down he got. To me, any Starfleet officer who
didn't express his views to his commanding officer about the ethical stakes involved in a decision would be derelict in his duty.)
Bottom line, Starfleet's profession is not really "arms." If things come down to combat, that means someone
failed at his job. And in the grand scheme of things, I find it reassuring that IRL we have a society in which most viewers (and writers)
don't have any personal experience of military service. The kind of society in which most people did have that experience would be a very different one indeed, and far less comfortable, open, and free. Indeed, it would arguably be more of a precursor to the Mirror Universe than to the UFP.
Mirrorca is such a hard-ass. Let that guy brutally executed instead of saying Maddox´s sister name to anger him and to not ruin the surprise early, I guess.
I thought that was one of the most effective touches of this episode, and not because Lorca was a "hard-ass." Initially it seemed like an impossible situation... he couldn't give his torturer what he wanted, his sister's name, not even to save a life, because he honestly didn't know it. It was an effective fake-out, conveying the impression that he wasn't from the MU, even to those viewers who already suspected. Then, when the reveal came, it cast the situation in a whole new light... we realized that he knew the name but was refusing to say it out of sheer self-preservation, playing for time, because he knew that the minute he gave his torturer that satisfaction, he'd be a dead man.
It was still a morally conflicted decision, thought, like so many we've seen Lorca make before, because playing for time that way meant letting a complete stranger be brutally murdered in front of him. Of course, Burnham behaved similarly in the same episode, preserving her own life at the expense of the lives of several of the Emperor's officers (not to mention an innocent Kelpian)... the difference being that Burnham didn't know what was coming. Lorca did, and went through with it anyway. What exactly that says about him, and whether the ends will be worth it, remains to be seen.
