Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x13 - "What's Past Is Prologue"

Time travel is basically always new to our heroes, any heroes, even when they encounter it for the sixth time. So nothing wrong with Stamets being a time machine. It's just that they have conveniently written him as being out of spores, so we can't get an instant fix that way.

We see the border on the map move to the upper left a lot. But the map really describes a very small area - any set of Trek heroes travels much farther than that in their adventures. Even in the deliberately "small" Star Charts take of Trek astrography that everybody onscreen seems to be basing their maps on nowadays, the losses on that map are minuscule. We know the Klingons like to squabble about the border, and this really only amounts to that so far.

That is, until we learn of a major world getting conquered. But Star Charts places no "major worlds" at the Klingon border, and quite deliberately so. The enemy is now at the Southeast Gates (okay, Antispinrim Gates), and those gates in modern reckoning are Vulcan and Andoria, but whether they are gone or not depends on the minutest minutiae of that map.

Nevertheless, this is much bigger than the war before "Into the Forest". And up until "Magic to Make", there really was no war - even with Kol distributing those cloaks, there were few if any Starfleet casualties other than those from the initial battle, and we never heard of civilian ones, or of lost planets or whatnot. Now we see what must be bona fide conquest. Is TOS in actual contradiction of that? "Errand of Mercy" is sort of ambiguous on past Klingon conflict, but a couple of other episodes have our heroes boast on Starfleet maintaining a long peace. Was that by winning all the wars?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I've been doing a comparison between 3 maps. The "Official" map, the one we got earlier in discovery and we one we saw at the end of this episode.

Pretty sure this is what it basically looks like atm.

 

I gave it a ten. I just have to appreciate how all those threads sewn through the whole season, all those character arcs finally came together to make sense. This is my first 10 for the show, I don't hand them out easily, it has to be earned. today's episode earned it.

 

'long' is relative. for European standards 10 years of peace is not much, for US standards, when was the last time they were not at war with some scapegoat of sorts? 10 years of peace is a 'very long' period by American standards

 

I agree (but it's never "good" IMO). It's schlocky, pulpy and written like a cartoon. It's very childish in a way.

I was hoping for something more mature while still maintaining some levity. Discovery does neither.

 

For goodness sake...

Just watched the rest of After Trek

Now we’ve got the executive producer saying how great it was to have the bridge crew coming together after Saru’s speech to work as a family because people have been complaining that they haven’t been because of Lorca’s influence but it was all about showing them eventually coming together but they had to go through TWELVE FREAKING EPISODES first...!

TWELVE EPISODES. If only at SOME POINT during EVEN ONE of those episodes they had shown Lorca somehow STOPPING the bridge crew working together through the force of his personality, rather than showing how he is moulding them into a fighting force and how proud he is of them and them being SEEMINGLY OK with it but BECAUSE NONE OF THEM GETS ANY DIALOGUE IN TWELVE EPISODES THERE’S NO CHANCE FOR THEM TO SHOW THAT THEY’RE NOT A COMBINED UNIT.

So that whole plot development happens IN THE PRODUCERS MINDS with no inkling of it coming out on screen. But hey look, after TWELVE EPISODES - to paraphrase the exec producer - “this was us saying look we get it, we’re fans too, we want them to work as a team as well”

Twelve freaking episodes. Without a hint. In fact leading us in the opposite direction. Couldn’t possibly have built something into any episode. I get that it might have twigged us to Lorca sooner..but good writing could have covered that, because there’s already the “We’re at war, you do what I tell you” part of Lorca’s personality that would account for his behavior.

This is on a par with Rian Johnson being unable to find a way to take Star Wars in a new and possibly needed direction while at the same time giving fans who have waited 40 years to see Luke Skywalker again some ass-kicking lightsabre action.

Not possible to do both apparently. Give me a freaking break. I could do it in my sleep

ONLY the potential of watching Saru lead this crew is keeping me in the game

 

IF it is time travel, it all depends on the execution. Many of Star Trek's most popular episodes involve a reset button: Yesterday's Enterprise, Twilight, Year Of Hell, etc. Let's wait and see how they do it. Plus, now that I've seen the preview for next week it says that 20% of the Federation has been conquered so time travel may not even be required. I also don't see how the Klingons conquering 20% of the Federation is not canon. Am I forgetting something?

 

Can we not use the word retards, please?

 

I'd be fine with that. It's just that Carol Marcus explicitly speaks of "a century" of peace... But that could be of the peace-through-superior-firepower sort, as in "Whom Gods Destroy" Kirk himself admits to having been a warrior once, while crediting the visionary politicians of his youth with the current state of peace and equality.

DSC would be in Kirk's warrior youth, spot on...

Timo Saloniemi

 

I knew it! I knew Burnham would end up saving ... in that beam out.

 

Maybe "the event" that Fuller talked about way back when has something to do with McCoy's line about Vulcan being conquered in "Conscience of the King".

 

Carol Marcus in Wrath of Khan: "Starfleet has kept the peace for a hundred years." And that's coming from someone with reason to be skeptical of Starfleet. Doesn't sound like a statement that describes losing substantial chunks of the Federation in a major war just a generation earlier...

 

Europe has been at peace for over 70 years
(ignoring Ukraine, ignoring Yugoslavia, ignoring UK's little cock showing with Argentina)
It's all perspective, really

 

Yeah I agree, he didn't really do anything to the crew that was out of line. Yeah he was brusque at times but he seemed to be pretty respectful of the crew for the most part. If anything, I think Lorca actually liked the crew, as much as a MU tyrant can like his crew. They could have just said that the crew isn't working well together because morale is in the toilet due to the war and had a scene of Saru discipline two crewmembers for getting into a fight or something.

I think this got left by the wayside due to the shows pacing. As much as I like Discovery, the pacing feels like the show has taken a hit of the worlds purest cocaine taken off it's clothes stolen a car and is now driving through a school zone at 100 km an hour.

In all seriousness though nothing will ever be as bad as what Rian Johnson did to star wars. I'm not one of those sci fi fans that gets all pitchforky often but god damn.

 

From Isaacs on how we are all not too far from the Mirror version of ourselves:

“It’s just a question of how tolerant you are and how selfish you are and how open-minded you are. That’s the Mirror world we painted.”

It was?? Must have missed that bit. Apart from his speech at the end there was no sense that the mirror Lorca was just a bit less tolerant version of prime Lorca. He was a racist asshole. Not someone that you looked at and thought - as Isaacs suggested on After Trek and in interviews - “well, I can see that when I’m having a bad day even I could be like that..”

Nope. I never have days that bad.

When will these writers and producers realise that what they have in their head actually has to make it onto the screen??

 

Honestly they're hacks. The writing of this show is so goddamn shallow it's legitimately eye rolling.

It's an apt comparison, I've been comparing Discovery with Disney's Star Wars for quite some time now and they largely share the same problems. The writing in pop culture franchises has honestly gone off a cliff recently and I'm not exactly sure why. It has to be a top down decision though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/c...i_now_has_a_lower_audience/dreqs9u/?context=3

This rant from a Star Wars fan about the direction of the new Star Wars movies honestly echos a lot of my same feelings towards the direction of Discovery.

"In sequels everyone's so ineffectual, no one can get any job done properly and definitely. Film makers do not have guts to define anyone or anything. It's just collection of quips, gimmicks and random events, while shoehorning a general philosophical theme, such as failure is the greatest teacher."
"...And everything needs a fucking explanation or a comic or a commentary or exclusive DVD booklet to understand. Where OT left holes they were only expanding your awe with the universe. Main things were perfectly covered and clear, and the remaining was left for your imagination to fill. Here, it's exactly the opposite, good luck trying to figure out why is anything important or how things are related to anything else."

 

Georgiou is bad ass...it'll be interesting to see how her unencumbered MU morality 'helps' the Federation push back the Klingons circa 2256 now that Starfleet appears to be losing the war.

I'm picking up some Section 31 vibes from the trailer.

 

Questions for the Treksperts...is this the first time we've seen a tandem beam-out result in two single beam-ins?

 

Do you think Yeoh will stick around? I don't. I definitely don't see the evil emperor from another dimension becoming the regular captain character. She'll die to complete Burnham's season arc. (And so there's not a MU character running around in the PU. Have to put the toys back in the box.)

Just stay patient. We had to watch those first two episodes to see the real pilot, didn't get to see the ship until episode three, then had to sit through 12 episodes to see the real crew interaction. Maybe we'll get to the actual show in season three, like in TNG.

I'm joking, of course. I just wish the crew had had more to do in their season-long journey of unity. I don't even know most of their names. Among the main characters, I'm not sure how their interactions have changed, other than being told they have.

 

Same here.

I can accept that Johnson has found a canon Star Wars book that shows a force projection as a thing that Jedi can do. But Rian can I point out how it says they can create a duplicate which is “visually indistinguishable” from the real thing?

So probably not a younger version of yourself weilding a blue lightsaber that no longer exists because it was recently torn in half.

Oh and thanks for taking the time to tell us how you made really sure to drop hints that it wasn’t the real Luke, such as how ice crystals sizzled on Ren’s lightsaber but not on Luke’s.

Because, you know, when we’re watching and trying to digest the whole scene we’re going to notice tiny little things like that. I didn’t even realise that ice crystals were falling. Especially since it was established in TFA that Ren’s lightsabre sizzles and spits unlike the others.

Really helpful Rian.

Just a shame you didn’t put the same amount of effort into the fact that the amount of firepower unleashed by the walkers to try to kill Luke only seemed to disturb the top layer of salt on the ground, showing the red underneath, rather than making a freaking huge hole like it should have.

I could go on. But I digress. Just couldn’t be bothered looking up a Star Wars board to post this.

Maybe I’ll tweet it to Johnson.