…Take, for instance, Stamets and Culber. Their relationship is offered up as a loud screaming message "gay is normal", deal with it. Now while I personally think that anyone who thinks otherwise is off their heads, the fact is that many audience members, especially in Trek's home nation of America, still have homophobic views. They aren't going to have their views changed by being told what to think. They need to be shown why they may not have the right views. ...
I agree with you that guiding discussion and thought is more likely to pursued than saying “you are wrong”, but I have to disagree with the idea the Discovery is “telling” people they are wrong about gay relationships being normal. Discovery is simply presenting a gay relationship as normal, as it exists normally all across America and in many many places around the world. This is one case where Star Trek hasn’t made an overly showy deal about the message they are trying to get across. They just show the reality. If people want to object to it, it is not because Discovery is hammering them over the head with a message.
Yeah, that bit was disappointing too. His arrival in the PU was through quite literally the most directly contrived bit of exposition they could shoehorn into the episode.
In fact, it didn't even make sense as presented. Allegedly he crossed over because he was transporting aboard the Buran just as it was entering an ion storm (akin to the transporter accident in the original "Mirror, Mirror"). Except... this was also happening while the Buran was under fire from the Charon. And there's no way he could have been transporting while that was happening, because the Buran's shields would have had to be up to avoid instant destruction, and one of the most basic Known Things about Treknology is that you can't transport through shields…
The dialog is unclear in this scene. My take from it was the ISS Buran was under attack, with shields failing. They duck into an ion storm to hide from the ISS Charon and take the opportunity to beam MU Lorca up. The switch occurs during transport.
…Actually it probably started losing it's brains and heart around Season 4 of Voyager when Seven of Nine came on board to boost ratings and draw in the 18 - 49 males who didn't like Janeway and were turning off in droves…
Enterprise was even worse it was dull and lifeless and had to resort to showing hot people in their underwear to maintain interest. Season 3 had to resort to an interstellar conflict and characters being morally grey and in some cases down right villainous to get people interested, however the way it was executed was poorly done and pretty unintelligent…
Disagree about Voyager, despite other intentions they might have had on hiring Jeri Ryan, they ended up hiring a great actress. Additionally, the writers were apparently actually interested in writing for the new character, so they turned out better scripts. Now, not everything they did improved the show, but I don’t think it went downhill after that.
As for Enterprise, I agree. It was not going well, and despite their well-intentioned effort to improve things by going with a more serialized arc for season 3 (which can improve character continuity and create a more important storyline than episodes-of-the-week), I don’t think it was all that great of an improvement. I still remember shaking my head when Enterprise had a character (Xindi reptilian) basically say the cliché “guards, have this prisoner taken away”. It was pretty bad. Now, I don’t see you mention Enterprise season 4 which I felt was truly streets ahead, and what Enterprise should have been all along (that plus more of the “early Starfleet” stuff that we only see in “First Flight” that Braga, surprisingly, intended on being the original season 1 setting before the network told him to get his ass into space in episode 1).
Yeah, looking at just that dialogue you might think that is hypocrisy, but there are a lot of contextual details that clarify the situation.
1) In “Journey’s End”, the planet is a Federation planet, where Federation citizens moved to creating a colony. In treaty negotiations, the Federation agreed to exchange the planet with the Cardassians for other territory/benefits. Well within the rights of the sovereign Federation to do. By treaty it was then Starfleet’s obligation to get the colonists to move – if they did not move they would become subjects of the Cardassian Empire (I don’t remember if the episode states that the treaty requires their removal or not – either way, the Federation is entirely in the right in asking them to move).
2) In “Insurrection” the planet and people in question are an alien race, who despite not being native to the planet, are its current inhabitants and as far as anyone says or knows, the planet’s rightful “owners”. The Federation, with no jurisdiction, plans to oust the inhabitants, who are assumed at that time to be pre-warp, and forcibly move them to another world and deprive them of the health benefits of their “home” planet.
The two situations are totally different and in no way depict hypocrisy on the part of Picard or the Federation, sure in “Insurrection” the Federation is wrong, but they weren’t being hypocritical.
The teaser for next week doesn't really line up with the ending of this week on that score. The Federation have no ability to respond to a signal, not even an automated beacon.... but actually are two thirds still armed and 80% unconquered? Based on what Saru saw, his assessment is accurate. But it seems that the show decided not to be quite so desperate after all.
Yeah, I pass that off as being a cliffhanger edit. Same thing happened when the first jump to the Mirror Universe: the dialog at the end of “Into the Forest I go” is different than that at the start of “Despite Yourself”.
I thought SM-G actually did a good job on this episode.
So both Mirror and PU Landry were crazy militant types. Kind of like O'Brien being a nice guy in both universes. I don't know why writers do this. It's the Mirror Universe, EVERYONE IS EVIL (or good if they're EVIL in the PU). Just have fun with what is a pretty flimsy concept to begin with, geez. 0
Hopefully you are paraphrasing Prime Rom…?
…When MU Lorca crossed over, was PU Lorca transporting too and swapped with him?
…Mirror Universe in general was done decently, just felt like it didn't really take advantage things and just left a lot hanging.
Now we jump to a time travel/alternate future duo to wrap up the season. Do they go back to an earlier point, or say 'eff it' and just fix what they can in the present and move on?
I think PU Lorca was transporting too – matches with the “Mirror, Mirror” transporter accident.
I agree that Discovery lets a lot of stuff hang, some of this seems to be due to the short run times. Instead of giving the episodes a little bit more time to clearly explain things to tie little details up, the show tries to keep a break-neck pace and leaves many questions open. This could be useful in the future for the writers to exploit little unknown bits for good story purposes, but in the present it feels a little frustrating.
I can’t see them doing any time travel fix. So far the time travel mechanics have been restrained and a temporal reset would kill any character development and most of the fans would hate it.
