Pass. I find Jammer's reviews to be fair. And my own. That's it. 
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x12 - "Vaulting Ambition"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
I totally get that they're evil. But the show portrays their evilness via puerile caricature. The Emperor just randomly killing bunch of people was more of the same.
It wasn't random. There was a purpose. To limit who knows about the Prime Universe.
Yeah. It was the old "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you." put into action.
Quick thought re: that sourpants review - I'm gonna guess that on top of knowing how to make a nice painkiller to limit the effects of the agonizer booths, Lorca's built up some kind of a tolerance to them by now. Good skill for a MU captain to have. Either that, or he's, erm, into it.
If I was Admiral Survivor, I wouldn't make any long term plans.
If I was Admiral Survivor, I wouldn't make any long term plans.
That's Governor Survivor, thank you very much!
EAS with negative DSC review? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
I'll repeat myself from last week:
Who?
Who?
L'Rell's howl seemed genuine, but yeah it obviously could be faked, so I guess they would do some kind of intensive memory/medical scanning. Culber mentioned research/theory on how a mind overlay could work. Bring that researcher onto the case, figure it out.
Yeah, as above. They clearly have some theory as how it could work out, so I bet they could technobable up some "miracle" solution that confirms the situation and that Tyler is just tyler and is blameless. Though he might still blame himself - a continuation of his whole tortured character. I hope they keep him around, i like the character and the actor - after not really liking him upon his introduction.
I suspect people who dislike the series don't like it for the same reasons that I do like it.
If DSC gets better than I already think it is, what I think is "better" probably won't be what they think is better. Same for the reverse. If it becomes more to their liking, then it might become less to mine. Who knows.
So, at this point, I'm willing to just agree to disagree in those situations and leave it at that. It's not the first time it's happened and it won't be the last. I won't give them any issue because I've been on the other end myself.
Well, unless they start complaining about "SJWs!!!!!11111" Then that gets me going, and not just because of their opinion about DSC.
No, it doesn't.
We are told about the Terran Empire's nature by Burnham in episode 10 when they recover the Data Core from the Rebels. Burnham explains their Society, she explains how Terrans "live in constant fear" and why a great deal of the reason they are such jerks is a consequence from the Terran Empire's endless cycle of internal senseless violence. We've seen them taking enjoyment on torturing political enemies and hunting them like animals, justifying that's something they do for the greater good of their Society and not simply because they are evil bastards.
In episode 11 we learn through a Klingon why he rationalizes joining up with other Alien species. The Humans took his language, his culture as they did to every Alien Species. That talks volumes about the Terran Empire. They're xenophobic not only because they believe in some Eugenics fairytale, but because they see different cultures as competitors who must be squashed so the "Empire" can live on. It's a reference to a real world Fascist concept of the "demonization of the other".
In this episode the Emperor explains they have abandoned UFP ideals "millenia ago", indicating that the Terran Empire is probably an evolution of the Roman Empire. That tell us Earth "skipped" the Renaissance, Enlightenment, 18th Century Classical Liberalism, etc. and that the closest to these ideals on the MU are probably concepts from Classical Philosophy. And even those are considered "too radical" for the Terrans. Imagine how draconian one's belief must be if they look at Plato and call him a "dirty Leftie".
They definitely gave us a lot of nuance on the Terrans and why they do the horrible shit they do, they aren't bidimensional as you're implying they are.
Besides, Lorca's a Terran too, isn't he ? I would say that everything he did during this Season is an inquiry on the psyche of Terrans. You can't be more threedimensional than that.
Thanks for reminding me that Christopher Eccleston had only one series.
Indeed. I don't see how certain commentators in this thread don't get that.
I don't see why Uraei would choose him to be part of Thirty-One. Manipulate circumstances to get desired results from him? Yes. Directly recruit? No.
Why did they have to kill Culber, anyway? They've written themselves into a corner. Most of what we got of him was The Boyfriend for Stamets.
I loved that scene.
Someone would still complain. "I want camp, man! I want Shatner's overracting! I want everyone to be principled and cuddly!"
The whole mythos of the show is built around the CO being the main character. I defy anyone to say otherwise.
I don't love him. I don't like his acting. I have a very difficult time watching TOS, because of him. /rant
To me, as someone on the autism spectrum, the original portrayal of Burnham was far closer to being (stereotypically, at least) autistic. Tilly just had a lack of self confidence. (Tilly's initial portrayal as nervous and hypersocial was a huge turn-off to someone like me--I avoid people like that IRL as much as possible. My view of her character still hasn't recovered.)
The costuming seemed very much a nod to Yeoh's various martial arts movie roles.
My admiration for Yeoh's acting skills has increased even more since her return to Discovery. She managed to make the rather cliched Emperor character damn near terrifying.
To be honest, I'd give my left arm to watch a Star Trek: Shenzhou series, over Discovery. I think Phillipa Georgiou is a far better person and officer than Michael Burnham could ever hope to be, but they literally just made her a plot device.
I have to call this out as utter tripe. It's so off-base, it's not even wrong. The whole mushroom spore network thing is 100 percent pseudoscientific bullshit. What the @#$@#@#$ hell were the writers thinking?
That was the Charon.
It drives me nuts, too. I wouldn't let her anywhere near a starship after what she did, even as a civilian contractor. Such a job would require a security clearance--something she should never have again.
That's the hell of it. Thirty-One isn't even Starfleet at all (Kelvinverse BS notwithstanding)! They never were. They are completely unsanctioned (and controlled by a superintelligent computer system in the novel continuity.)
On TV, anyway. As for the Litverse, Mackinzie Calhoun, anyone? Actually, Lorca reminds me a lot of Calhoun, which is why I like him.
Someone actually implied Lorca's fascist for yelling at a subordinate?
To be perfectly honest, it's not. It's science fantasy, and always has been. I don't like it any less because of that, but it's clearly not concerned with even approaching scientific accuracy of any form, regardless of what producers have said in the past. They (at least during the Berman era) were very good at inventing engineering technobabble, but their grasp of even basic physics, biology, and chemistry is horrendous.
* * *
That ship has a very anime vibe to it.
* * *
That wasn't true even in the days before ebooks? Now? A book can be updated every few days, if the writer wants to. Some even slap on "version numbers", like with software, now.
It fits that trope, but I would say said trope is justified in this case. She needed to make sure word didn't get out about there being a parallel universe.
You shouldn't be having lovers aboard ship to begin with, but that's a rant for another day.
No. They aren't space Nazis. This is a space Nazi
A more appropriate cliche would be "space Romans".
Fascists (with a capital "F") and Nazis are not the same thing. Nazis had some fascist tendencies, but they weren't Fascists. That you're conflating the two hurts your credibility somewhat.
Why? Being stuck in a weak human body would be a fate worse than death for Voq. She needed to go ahead and send him to Sto-Vo-Kor. It was the most genuinely Klingon scene of the whole series.
Please, no.
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If you are able to rise above the more base reasons why many watch it, then good for you. But at least my perception from my limited viewing of some of it and moreso the reactions of various friends and family to it impress me that it is basically following a fancy version of the formula used by the "professional wrestling" programs. They have the "good" wrestlers and the "villain ones", and they generally introduce some new "villain" wrestler in a match where they openly cheat in front of the viewing audience to win matches. They do this for a while, ramping up the negative emotions of the fans, and then eventually give a payout match where the "good" wrestlers manage to outfox the latest attempt at cheating and win.
That pretty much sums up the formula Game of Thrones used for the Joffrey character. Deliberately make the most abhorrent little tyrant that people can imagine and the give the payout with the Purple Wedding. At least among those I observed, the reactions were not some high-minded philosophical musings, they were celebrating that someone that they had been conditioned to hate intensely had been killed slowly and painfully.
And this was addressed to another, but I'll toss in my two cents:
In the real world, pretty much every major attempt to create a utopian society has resulted in rigidly hierarchical militaristic society, because you cannot make people adhere to whatever the utopian vision is -- from Hitler's Third Reich to Stalin's Communist future -- without employing a massive use of force. As one meme so quaintly put it:
You seem to be assuming that peace can be achieved unilaterally. If someone is intent on either subjugating or simply killing you, your own peaceful intentions will not make their threat cease to exist. It was actually illustrated nicely in the prologue to this series -- the two most ardently pacifist characters were also among the first to die. It isn't because the peaceful folks were evil, it is because the Klingons intended to attack regardless what the Federation representatives said.
Actually, I see the opposite. My dad fought in WWII, and I agree with the common sentiment that in many ways they were the "greatest generation". Those young people sacrificed a great deal in order to help the rest of us be free of tyranny. My own father spent Christmas time during the Battle of the Bulge sleeping outside during one of the coldest winters in Belgium's recorded weather records, and saw friends and allies brutally killed by soldiers of one of the most evil regimes in history. He and others who voluntarily endured such hell didn't make our society like the vile dictatorship that they were fighting, they kept us free. People who do these things are not horrible blots on our society, they are our heroes.
In contrast, in today's society after many have been born and raised with no experience of what is at stake in a war, we have increasing numbers of people who believe that they have a "right to not be offended". I've seen a clip of a fringe British politician actually being arrested and handcuffed in modern England for simply reciting verbatim in public a quote by Sir Winston Churchill.
IMHO, the path to something like the Terran Empire doesn't lie in nationalism, military service, or right-wing politics, but rather in the collectivist belief that people who disagree with them are inherently evil and should be punished for it. Once people buy into the absurd notion that they have a "right to not be offended", then they empower the government to deprive others of one of their most basic rights in a civilized society. It is only when the government decides that the original complainants have also committed some sort of thought crime that some of them wake up to the grave that they've dug for themselves.
So it's basically like all the other mirror universe episodes then?
If you are able to rise above the more base reasons why many watch it, then good for you. But at least my perception from my limited viewing of some of it and moreso the reactions of various friends and family to it impress me that it is basically following a fancy version of the formula used by the "professional wrestling" programs. They have the "good" wrestlers and the "villain ones", and they generally introduce some new "villain" wrestler in a match where they openly cheat in front of the viewing audience to win matches. They do this for a while, ramping up the negative emotions of the fans, and then eventually give a payout match where the "good" wrestlers manage to outfox the latest attempt at cheating and win.
That pretty much sums up the formula Game of Thrones used for the Joffrey character. Deliberately make the most abhorrent little tyrant that people can imagine and the give the payout with the Purple Wedding. At least among those I observed, the reactions were not some high-minded philosophical musings, they were celebrating that someone that they had been conditioned to hate intensely had been killed slowly and painfully.
And this was addressed to another, but I'll toss in my two cents:
In the real world, pretty much every major attempt to create a utopian society has resulted in rigidly hierarchical militaristic society, because you cannot make people adhere to whatever the utopian vision is -- from Hitler's Third Reich to Stalin's Communist future -- without employing a massive use of force. As one meme so quaintly put it:
You seem to be assuming that peace can be achieved unilaterally. If someone is intent on either subjugating or simply killing you, your own peaceful intentions will not make their threat cease to exist. It was actually illustrated nicely in the prologue to this series -- the two most ardently pacifist characters were also among the first to die. It isn't because the peaceful folks were evil, it is because the Klingons intended to attack regardless what the Federation representatives said.
Actually, I see the opposite. My dad fought in WWII, and I agree with the common sentiment that in many ways they were the "greatest generation". Those young people sacrificed a great deal in order to help the rest of us be free of tyranny. My own father spent Christmas time during the Battle of the Bulge sleeping outside during one of the coldest winters in Belgium's recorded weather records, and saw friends and allies brutally killed by soldiers of one of the most evil regimes in history. He and others who voluntarily endured such hell didn't make our society like the vile dictatorship that they were fighting, they kept us free. People who do these things are not horrible blots on our society, they are our heroes.
In contrast, in today's society after many have been born and raised with no experience of what is at stake in a war, we have increasing numbers of people who believe that they have a "right to not be offended". I've seen a clip of a fringe British politician actually being arrested and handcuffed in modern England for simply reciting verbatim in public a quote by Sir Winston Churchill.
IMHO, the path to something like the Terran Empire doesn't lie in nationalism, military service, or right-wing politics, but rather in the collectivist belief that people who disagree with them are inherently evil and should be punished for it. Once people buy into the absurd notion that they have a "right to not be offended", then they empower the government to deprive others of one of their most basic rights in a civilized society. It is only when the government decides that the original complainants have also committed some sort of thought crime that some of them wake up to the grave that they've dug for themselves.
Well said x100000000000
No. The Terran Empire is a post-Industrial Society. The Roman Empire is a pre-Industrial one. The closest system to the Terran Empire would be the Nazifascist one, since that flourished in a post-Industrial Society IRL through the 1920s to the 1940s.
Fascism was conceptualized by Mussolini as a corny "revival" and "continuation" of the "ancient glory of the Roman Empire" adapted for the contemporaneous age. He intended his Italian Empire to be a "spiritual successor" of the Roman Empire. Just like the Terrans are a successor State too.
Besides, the Terrans practice Eugenics. That's a post 19th century political ideology. The Romans didn't knew what Eugenics were. It's totally anachronistic trying to imply Romans knew concepts like Social Darwinism, Racial Biology pseudosciences, etc. They didn't. It's like saying Capitalism existed in Babylonia during Ancient times.
Nazis and Fascists are the same thing. Brazilian Integralistas, Irish Blueshirts, British Blackshirts, etc. alongside Nazis were all local variations and different interpretations of the original Italian Fascist doctrine. They were all Fascists. They exchanged ideas, they all shared a blatant sense of antisemitism and a hatred for Capitalism and Communism. They were both Far Right political beliefs.
They all believed in the superiority of the citizens of their home countries and they wanted to "revive" the glory of their Nation's past. With the Germans that resulted in the Nazis trying to glorify the Germanic Tribes who fought against the Romans in Ancient Times. The same way Benito and the Blackshirts longed for their "Mare Nostrum".
Pretty much. I never liked mirror episodes, but now it seems we are stuck with these cannibal nazis for half a season
Not a fan of all this MU stuff but still found it entertaining enough...Though not a fan of MU Lorca twist - though called it in my house way back when Cornwall was talking about their holiday/date in ep or whatever it was and he clearly he no idea what she was talking about! Hopefully this do something interesting and unexpected with this - Though I have a feeling Isaacs will leave at end of this season - I can't see him signing up for more than a year - And I suspect Tyler may die 'redeeming' himself killing Lorca to save Burnham...It all seems a bit of an entertaining mess at the moment tbh...There are going to be no cast members left at this rate - apart from Burnham and Tilly!
