At least they stayed away from the evil but sexy gay/lesbian trope. Can you imagine if Mirror Stamets was wearing a gimp mask and assless chaps?
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x12 - "Vaulting Ambition"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
At least they stayed away from the evil but sexy gay/lesbian trope. Can you imagine if Mirror Stamets was wearing a gimp mask and assless chaps?
After this week, I can't imagine anyone saying this show needs more camp.
Agreed.
No. They aren't space Nazis. This is a space Nazi
A more appropriate cliche would be "space Romans".
Agreed again, though they look smarter in classic gray!
Like others, I had a feeling for a few weeks Captain Lorca was not from our universe. But, holy SHIT was the reveal tense. As Maddox kept telling him to "Say her name!" I wanted to be wrong. I wanted all that time Lorca spent in the agony booth to be for the good of getting the Discovery home. But, when he said her name, then stomped Maddox's head, I was like "Shit!"
I liked this show before, now I'm officially in love! Don't get me wrong, I love the other series, but there's only so many crews in the Federation that can be comprised of the best and the brightest, and it's refreshing to follow a crew that is flawed. It'll be interesting to see the fallout when Discovery returns home.
Will Lorca be outed as an enemy (if he lives)? Sure, Gabriel Lorca is not from the Prime Universe, but he was a master tactician in the Federation's war with the Klingons, winning countless battles. Will this be taken into consideration when determining his fate, and will he get to keep his commission as skipper of Discovery, assuming Burnham et al reveal his true identity?
What will happen to Burnham? We can assume the war with the Klingons will be over when (if) Discovery returns to Federation space. But, since Burnham is a mutineer and the instigator of the costly war, she should still receive a one way ticket to prison. Unless, of course, Captain Lorca or perhaps Commander Saru can convince the admiralty to keep her onboard.
And then there's the matter of Ash Tyler and what will happen with him.
I'm pretty excited to see where this goes, but I really hope they don't make Mirror Lorca the villain, as I like Jason Isaacs in the role and don't want to see him go anywhere.
I liked this show before, now I'm officially in love! Don't get me wrong, I love the other series, but there's only so many crews in the Federation that can be comprised of the best and the brightest, and it's refreshing to follow a crew that is flawed. It'll be interesting to see the fallout when Discovery returns home.
Will Lorca be outed as an enemy (if he lives)? Sure, Gabriel Lorca is not from the Prime Universe, but he was a master tactician in the Federation's war with the Klingons, winning countless battles. Will this be taken into consideration when determining his fate, and will he get to keep his commission as skipper of Discovery, assuming Burnham et al reveal his true identity?
What will happen to Burnham? We can assume the war with the Klingons will be over when (if) Discovery returns to Federation space. But, since Burnham is a mutineer and the instigator of the costly war, she should still receive a one way ticket to prison. Unless, of course, Captain Lorca or perhaps Commander Saru can convince the admiralty to keep her onboard.
And then there's the matter of Ash Tyler and what will happen with him.
I'm pretty excited to see where this goes, but I really hope they don't make Mirror Lorca the villain, as I like Jason Isaacs in the role and don't want to see him go anywhere.
Rottentomatoes 100% fresh.
Third episode to be 100% and sixth to be 90% or above. So cheer up!
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/star_trek_discovery/s01/e12
I'm with you here, and yet I'm not. Do such people exist? Yes, absolutely. (Although even they don't go to the extreme of cannibalism.) Have such people even held power here on earth, in specific times and places? Yes. The Spanish Inquisition existed. The Nazis existed. Pol Pot existed.
But they're outliers, and they always have been. They've never been the norm, nor anywhere close to it. The past couple of years in US politics have certainly encouraged a lot of them to crawl out from under the rocks where they usually reside, and people not too distant from their ilk do hold disproportionate power in this country at the moment, but even so, they're not the majority nor ever will be. They don't represent the tide of history, they fight against it. The notion that they could be so commonplace as to control a global society for centuries, much less millennia, stretches one's suspension of disbelief.
So yes, the Terran Empire is certainly meant as a reflection of the worst aspects of human behavior IRL. But it's also an exaggeration, a caricature. And even as such, IMHO cannibalism is taking things farther than necessary to make the point.
Part of what you say here makes the MU seem somewhat more plausible (in relation to what I wrote above), but part makes it seem even less so.
On the one hand, it's clear enough that the Terran Empire does rule through pervasive fear. That's how most despotic regimes maintain their hold on power, after all. If a group of sociopaths gets its hands on power, even if it's a small minority, it can exercise that power over much larger numbers by keeping them in fear.
For a while.
But that level of tyranny never sustains itself for long. Usually no more than a couple of generations. Usually either saner heads prevail and push reforms from within, or the oppressed masses realize they have the numbers on their side and something triggers a revolution. Heck, that kind of pressure for change is what Spock represented in the original "Mirror, Mirror," and it appears to be what Lorca represents here.
The notion that such a regime could sustain itself long-term is therefore just not plausible. The notion that it could have done so since Roman times is even less so. And that's setting aside that the Roman Empire itself through most of its history, except for a few low points, was not as vile as the Terran Empire appears to be. (Heck, even the Klingons, explicitly invented to be the ideological opposite of the Federation — fundamentally a society where survival means conquest, and the only alternative is slavery, notwithstanding all the lip service to "honor" — haven't typically been as vile as the Terran Empire.)
Okay, so the MU didn't have the same history as our reality. But if Rome didn't fall, and its martial values persisted... how did it become a technological, spacefaring society? Even without the Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc. that Europe experienced — and never mind the rest of the world! — it must have had some equivalents to those. It must have experienced the invention of the printing press, and the consequent scientific revolution, and the flowering of new ideas that accompanies that sort of thing. How could it go through all that without all any of those ideas ever catching on as alternatives to tyranny? IMHO, if one is to treat it as an even slightly coherent alternate history rather than just a flight of fantasy or an exercise in allegory, then a far more recent historical divergence point would make it at least somewhat more plausible.
Admirable dedication to IDIC there, or at least to the concept that "de gustibus non est disputandum." ;-) I can't help wondering what exactly your preferences might be, though, that leaves you so convinced that others would find them unlikeable.
For my part, I've been enjoying DSC so far, with caveats. I like that it's bringing to Trek the kind of long-form story arcs that characterize most of the best television today. I don't like that it's obviously the product of too many cooks, in terms of both story ideas and the on-screen realization of those ideas. Personally, I would prefer something that retains the more contemporary and sophisticated storytelling techniques, but offers a greater depth of characterization, and is otherwise closer to TOS in terms of story concepts, tone (including visuals), and themes. (Consider what the novels did with ST:Vanguard, for instance.)
I'm sure some people wouldn't like that, but I think on the whole it could have a pretty broad appeal.
But, hey, at least DSC isn't just another iteration of Berman-era Trek... or worse, something emulating the StarWars-ized JJ Abrams template.
Huh. Well, as Lord Garth just noted, opinions are subjective.
Personally, though, I think that anyone who sees TOS as "camp" and Shatner as "overacting" just fundamentally misunderstands Star Trek. TOS is the wellspring from which all later Trek is derived. It's the original and the best. I mean, empirically, intellectually, I do understand that there are people out there who became Trek fans through watching TNG or DS9, without ever seeing (or perhaps just without liking) the original... I just don't quite understand how. (And the notion that anyone could have come to Trek fandom through VOY, ENT, or the Abrams films strains my credulity even more.)
Interesting. Tilly struck me as a likely candidate for Asperger's from her very first scene. And for me that scene also radically improved the tone of the show, and finally convinced me that it might actually have something interesting to offer character-wise, because her insecurities made her instantly likable and relatable.
...and yet again, YMMV, opinions subjective, all that. I have enjoyed Yeoh in other roles, but here (both as Captain and as Emperor) I have found her completely cardboard and unconvincing.
Well, it's not nearly so much fantasy as, say, Star Wars, or a lot of other Hollywood product. These are matters of degree more than kind. It's about a 2+ (out of 5) on the Mohs Scale of SF Hardness.
Yeah, that's not a good thing. The visual design of DSC has been all over the map; some of it's good (a lot of the ship interiors), some of it's not (the Klingon makeup; ship exteriors other than the Discovery itself). This definitely qualifies as one of the worst examples of the latter. Even more than what we saw of the (supposed) Klingon D-7, this ship simply doesn't look like it belongs in the Trek universe.
Not sure what you're getting at here. Granted historians can and do argue over the exact defining characteristics of fascism, but the Nazi regime qualifies as fascist by almost any definition, certainly as much as the regimes in Italy or Spain.
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Between TOS, TNG, VOY, and the first two seasons of ENT, there are 19 seasons of Star Trek done the conventional way. I thought it was becoming stale. I like that Star Trek is adapting to 2018 by going the Prestige TV format. That isn't to everyone's liking. Or the way they're doing it isn't to everyone's liking. That's fine.
If Discovery becomes even more Discovery-ish, then I doubt it would make people who want another TOS or TNG like it more. I would like it. But it would be going further in a direction they already don't want. Thus the source of disagreement.
On the other hand, if they don't mind if DSC is trying to go the route of Prestige TV but don't like way it's being handled at all then -- with a different creative team or different creative choices -- we might end up on the same page at some point in the future
But, if you inherently don't like the way DSC is at all, and would prefer something else entirely, then them trying to get me to change my mind and me trying to get them to change their mind would be a waste of time for the next several years. I'm not interested. That never ends well.
I'd rather talk about my own enjoyment of the series than bother anyone who doesn't.
Worse comes to worse: if DSC gets cancelled after the second season, that's two seasons I was really into new Star Trek on TV again. Two is better than zero.
He did. He says it at the end, before he kills Maddox.
Hitler hates DSC.
Never forget:
http://captiongenerator.com/748872/Hitler-Reacts-to-Discovery-Getting-A-Second-Season
Thanks.
It was odd though, he ignored the demand to state the name for a prolonged period. Not sure why the writers made that choice.
To make us think he's Prime Lorca.
This is fucking perfect! l love it.
Well, these people were quite commonplace IRL. What would you call those who were in charge of the Genocide of the Amerindian Populations ? Maybe not "Nazifascists", no. Sure, it wasn't a Genocide that came out of Eugenics ideals, because that would be anachronistic... Still, it was a systemic killing of foreign populations so White settlers could move in and steal their lands. It's a process that endured until the end of the 19th Century. It's just vile and wrong, something that should not have been done at all. We've been doing terrible shit 90% of our History, that's the thing.
Commercial Slavery of African peoples was banned in the 19th Century, but in places like the U.S, Black People only gained full recognition as Citizens in the 1960s. In South Africa until the 1990s they still had the Apartheid. Having this Far Right upsurge just after we barely walked out of other horrible situations is scary as hell. Maybe TOS Mirror Universe was supposed to be a cartoony one-shot thing in the 1960s, but when watching DISCO in 2018 I will be damned if the Mirror Universe as it is portrayed in DSC doesn't ring me any bells...
I don't even see it as a "Mirror", it's more like "what if we were a little bit more evil ?". I mean, most of us here live in Free Societies, I think it's easy to forget that three to four generations ago most of our ancestors didn't. They lived in their own "Mirror Universes", facing discrimination, imprisonment, lack of freedom of speech, horrible work environment conditions due to exploitation, etc. If we are not careful our future generations may experience that too, that's why things like the Alt-right sound so terrifying.
Well... Technology isn't necessarily always born on Free Societies. Look at Nazi Germany. The Missile Technology that they developed was the precursor for the Space Program. God knows how far they would have gone if they weren't stopped by the War. In Authoritarian Regimes the desire to innovate comes more out of ambition, Social Mobility and all... It's almost feudalistic.
That was my guess, but from a character pov it could have been handled better.
Lorca's the type who like to push things to the edge until he has an advantage.
I'd say these MU episodes have been the least camp of any MU episodes to date. The problem is--as presented on screen--the overall concept doesn't lend itself to nuance. David Mack handles it much better in his MU novels, though.
I grew up with TNG and the TOS films, though long-term I've found DS9 far more to my liking than anything else, up to and including DSC. To be perfectly honest, I doubt I would have ever become a fan of the franchise at all by watching TOS.
Social awkwardness, by itself, does not an autistic person make. Not even close. As soon as Tilly gained confidence, all of that dropped away, without even any trace of strain from attempting to emulate Neurotypical ways (successfully or otherwise). That doesn't happen for autistic people--even when we appear to be able to function in society, it takes a toll on us, some more than others. We have to separate ourselves periodically to "recharge", as it were. Social situations don't give us energy--they drain it. That party during the Mudd episode would have been hell on earth for an autistic person, if for nothing else because of the harsh sensory input, but also likely because of the tons of nonverbal communication in such a situation we can't process intuitively.
Odo from DS9 is probably the best overall example of a realistic autistic archetype expressed through a character who's not explicitly autistic (there aren't any in Trek that I know of) I've ever seen anywhere.
Agreed.
Both L'Rell and Voq at the least, are guilty of assault on a Federation citizen and upon a Starfleet officer. Saru allowing L'Rell to suppress/kill Voq can be viewed as Saru protecting a Fed citizen and Discovery crew member which is Saru's sworn duty. Saru had no duty to protect an enemy attacker. Further, it could allso be argued that Voq was responsible for Culber's death which was another reason to allow the exorcism of Voq.
He has a duty to protect a POW under his care.
