Spoilers DSC: Drastic Measures by Dayton Ward Review Thread

Review The “Star Trek Discovery Drastic Measures” novel here.

I just got an email saying that my copy just shipped so this should be appearing in stores soon.

 

What's DIS? I thought it was DSC.

 

Or STD to the salty ones.

 

I don't know whether it's because I missed the broadcast airing of the DSC pilot, and don't have access to the series, or because the book was somehow unusually forgettable (even though I gave it an "Above Average!"), or because I was distracted at the time, but I completely forgot just about every aspect of Desperate Hours, and had to look it up on Mβ. Having looked it up, it all came back to me, which is a good sign. But I hope I don't find the whole series forgettable.

 

I haven't even read Desperate Hours yet. But at this point I'd rather have a novelization of some of the episodes, rather than books that are set before the series.

 

^ This is what you get for missing the strategy meetings.

 

I don't think "some of" really works for a show as serialized as this. For that matter, it'd be hard to fit in original novels set during a series as serialized as this.

 

We had the Dominion War novels that novelized 7 serialized episodes. From what I see on Memory Beta, Discovery's first season is split into two chapters, with Chapter 1 being 8 episodes. I'm sure that "Chapter 1" could've been novelized over two books.

 

1) Discovery is a show made for a streaming service, which means it's more or less released directly to home media. I suppose an argument can be made that a novelization could be a means of getting the story to people who don't subscribe to CBS All Access, but truth be told, it seems more economical to spend $5.99 a month and get all the episodes than it does to spend $7.99 on two MMPBs. Or more if they were trade paperbacks. Hell, if someone wanted to be really cheap about it, they could sign up for the free one month trial access, watch all the episodes and not bother to continue the subscription afterwards.
2) At this point, given there really aren't many new Trek novels a year, I'd rather get original content rather than novelizations.

 

Yes, because those were the only episodes that really were serialized that tightly. Remember that most other Trek episode novelizations were of 2-parters. The Dominion War DS9 duology put roughly 6 episodes of content (since they only included the end of "Call to Arms" and left out most of the Defiant subplot in "Behind the Lines") in 2 books, for about 3 episodes' worth of content per book, 50% more than usual. That's because they had to include the whole arc, not just part of it, or it wouldn't have been coherent.

It just doesn't work to use past Trek series as precedents for talking about Discovery. The approach of series television has changed too massively since then.

Four episodes per book? No, that would require cutting and compressing way too much, or else using really tiny print. Really, in this day and age of home video, the only value to a novelization is if it really expands meaningfully on the story, fleshes it out more fully than the original version could. And that could never happen if they had to compress and tighten everything to fit four episodes per book. The novelization would contain considerably less than the original episodes, not add more. So what would be the point?

 

Along with the other reasons already mentioned, I doubt CBS All Access is especially motivated to offer a way for people to consume the episodes' contents in a different medium without subscribing to the service itself.

 

Not everyone has access to CBS All Access or SPACE, Crave or Netflix.

A novelization would still make more sense at this point.

 

I have a friend who doesn’t have a Netflix account.

He is going to wait until all the episodes are available then take the month’s free trial, binge watch and then cancel.

 

Ah, but at just $5.99 per month for All Acess, or whatever Netflix costs in other countries, you too can enjoy Star Trek: Discovery!
I'm with TheAlmanac. CBS's ultimate goal is to get you to watch the show. They don't want to have alternatives. If a person somehow can't watch it, that person doesn't matter to them.

 

You make it sound like CBS is evil for wanting as many people as possible to watch their product and not buy a substitute.

 

Why do people insist on talking about these things as if a show on a given service will never exist anywhere else? There's this whole thing called home video. I couldn't see Powers when it premiered because I didn't have the PlayStation network, but it was out on DVD within a couple of months after its season ended, and I eventually managed to see the whole series for free by borrowing the disks from my library. I just had to wait a while longer, that's all. I'm sure Discovery will be out on DVD in time, just like every other Trek series. In the long term, which kind of service it premiered on won't matter at all. Once it's out on home video, you won't need CBS All Access to see it, any more than you need a time machine and a TV antenna to see TOS.

For that matter, the exact same principle applied to all the Trek movies. You couldn't see them for free on TV when they first came out; you had to go to a theater and buy a ticket. They were only available to a limited, paying audience -- at first. If you didn't want to pay to see them in a theater, you just had to wait until they showed up on commercial TV or on home video.

That's not the way the industry works. The whole reason things like tie-ins and home video exist is because anything that attracts more attention to a franchise is good for it. It's absurd to see two different forms of getting the same franchise before the public's eyes as competitors to each other. On the contrary, they complement each other, which is the entire reason they exist in the first place. If you buy the first season when it comes out on DVD or Blu-Ray, and you like it enough that you don't want to wait for the second season, then you might buy a subscription to CBSAA then. It's the long game.

It's the same now as it was with pay cable decades ago. I couldn't see the first five seasons of Stargate SG-1 when they were brand new, because I didn't subscribe to Showtime. But the show was released in wider syndication a year behind its release on Showtime, so I did get to see it, just a year later than subscribers did. Same with Showtime's Outer Limits. The only difference is that subscribers got to see it earlier and uncut. But it did become available by other means eventually, because multimedia distribution is good for a show's profits. The different releases aren't in competition with each other, because a large share of their profits ultimately goes to the same place.

 

Nah, no more "evil" than any other large media company. That's the nature of capitalism. Their goal is subscriptions.

These are all fair and accurate points. And they are doing tie-ins and releasing episodes on Amazon for purchase. I just don't think tomswift2002 was correct that "A novelization would still make more sense at this point." I doubt CBS cares that much about providing alternatives beyond a home video release that a novelization would make sense.

I was just kind of being a sarcastic bastard about it.

 

It's not the $5.99. It's the fact that (1) I neither have, nor want, a home broadband connection, and (2) I neither have, nor want, heavy enough iron in my home for a streaming service.

I buy video content the same way I buy recorded audio: on physical media.

 

A novelization wouldn't make sense, but not because of anything to do with CBS All Access. It wouldn't make sense for the reasons I've already offered: The show is serialized so you'd have to novelize the whole thing, and that would be hard to do in a format that would allow adding anything substantial to make it worth doing, and it's pretty redundant when the show will probably be out on DVD in a few months anyway. Novelizations are much less of a thing these days than they used to be, because they don't serve as much purpose anymore.

 

Once again, you make excellent points.