Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x14 - "The War Without, The War Within"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Same unsaid thing with Lorca, assuming he knew about the Defiant...the federation have to win the war etc, to have the Defiant fulfill its part in history, otherwise the past 100 years of MU history don’t unfold the way they remember. It’s a cross universe pre-destination paradox. (Though others have suggested it’s not the case, as the Defiant is simply from a universe where things did unfold in the PU the way we know. But Trek doesn’t usually work that way. Same thing applies to the KT...events in the PU have to unfold all the way up to Hobus, because otherwise Nero and Spock don’t cross over, and their history is affected. They would probably prefer that though.)
I loved this.
I was saying to a dear friend of mine that there’s no way to put Georgiou back in the Captain’s chair without looking very silly. But then they did exactly that, and I was all ‘oh my god i love this.’ They even had the pony-tail-around-the-shoulder thing with Yeoh’s hair that I love from the pilot. My facebook friends are sick of me posting pics of Georgiou, but it’s starting to look as it though it may be the price one pays for being my buddy
Oh how I wish I had friends that would post pictures of star trek characters endlessly on FB! You friends don;t realise how lucky they are.
Janeway never got lost. She knew where she was in the Delta Quadrant. 75 000 light years away from home.Problem is women captains tend to get their ships destroyed, or lost.
Most certainly just build-up for the finale, but what build-up it was! A terrific sense of desperation and creeping dread, the war is starting to feel more real and visceral than it did in the first half of the season.
And Erika Hernandez did a good job in canon, at least. And Janice Lester might've been crazy, but the Enterprise survived. Captain Benteen, Captain Tryla Scott (youngest in history), and even acting Captains like Jadzia Dax, Beverly Crusher, or Deanna Troi (just don't give her navigation...) kept their ships intact.
The only thing that comes to mind, besides OG Georgiou, is Madge Sinclair's two female Captains. The percentage is still high in comparison to all the male captains who lost their ships, but that's a problem with Trek diversity or whatnot.
I can't wait for Discovery to end its run, it's been such a disappointment
Or, alternativly, you don't watch it, and let us who think it's a great show simply enjoy it.
I can't wait for Discovery to end its run, it's been such a disappointment
So you keep saying. Every week.
I'd change the phrasing to 'have been told' - it would be incredibly obvious to the crew who have literally just returned from a universe of duplicates led by Phillipa Georgiou's duplicate. Unless we assume the crew are truly dimwitted, we can conclude this is an 'open secret' on board. Which explains the limited reactions by Detmer et al to her sudden appearance.
Also from the preview scenes for next week, The Emperor is not really hiding the fact that she isn't PU Georgiou. She basically tells Saru how much she would like to eat him in front of everyone.
I gave it an 8 simply based on Cornwell and Tyler/Burnham, otherwise it was mighty flat.
Glad to see Cornwell be a Tour de force tonight. She was the real show stealer.
The dynamic between Tyler and Burnham was a bit soul-crushing for me, especially in that last scene
.
It seems to me that Georgiou is up to something. I shy away from saying she'll pull a Lorca on us, but I can't help but think that that's her endgame. Then again, I can't trust any gut feelings with this show because they've all been wrong lol. (Which I love. No Trek show has ever made me second guess everything as much as Disco
)
Hoping for a bang of a finale next week!
Glad to see Cornwell be a Tour de force tonight. She was the real show stealer.
The dynamic between Tyler and Burnham was a bit soul-crushing for me, especially in that last scene
.It seems to me that Georgiou is up to something. I shy away from saying she'll pull a Lorca on us, but I can't help but think that that's her endgame. Then again, I can't trust any gut feelings with this show because they've all been wrong lol. (Which I love. No Trek show has ever made me second guess everything as much as Disco
)Hoping for a bang of a finale next week!
So, this episode.
I think it was on a par with last week overall, albeit with different peaks and troughs, so I'm going to give it another 6. The storyline of this season has really lost my interest since the jump into the MU. Up until Into the Forest I Go, I was giving 7 and 8s, one 9. Since Despite Yourself, I've been giving 5s and 6s. I don't dislike the episodes exactly, but they lack the sort of promise, scope, character interplay, and general interest that they did before the mid season break.
This episode felt like a placeholder, a bridge between the MU arc and the finale. Not a lot happened, exactly, apart from setup. It didn't have any really intense eye rollers like the Lorca stuff last week, but there was little that peaked above average for me. I liked the Genesis device like idea of the Spore moon but it didn't really rise above the level of technobabble. It also struck me as somewhat dangerous that these life forms can take over a moon that fast. They could be a biological weapon in the wrong hands. I'm sure they won't warp off and leave this huge stock of them in the middle of a war zone.
Nice to see Cornwall again, I hoped she was being set up to be the new Captain, but I have a feeling Georgiou is going to fill that seat now. Which is... weird. How many Federation Starships can claim to have been captained by two impostors from the Mirror Universe?
Burnham and Ash... ugh. Just ugh. Not Dawson's Creek, people. However, the Tilly/Burnham scene was nice. I like their friendship, it is, post Lorca, my favourite relationship on the show.
It was nice that Stamets acknowledged Hugh's death this week, and almost made a facial expression about it. Still fairly minimal, and the storyline of the murder is only made more pointless by the fact that the crew all immediately forgive Tyler, presumably setting up his sticking around next year. Culber's murder remains my least favourite bit of this whole season. A dubious and stereotyped idea that was executed with a whimper, not a bang.
Scale of war is an issue in this series. 11,000 here, 80,000 there. Devastating on a personal level, don't get me wrong. But the Federation is enormous. Member worlds of billions. While it helps slot it into the timeline that it isn't actually that significant, it does lower the stakes somewhat. So far, the Great Klingon War is a good way short of wars fought with swords and flintlock rifles in casualties.
I liked the explanation for classifying the existence of the MU - it actually made a lot of sense. The theoretical existence of parallel worlds is presumably known about (it's known about now) but the idea that you can physically travel there would actually be a truly incredible bit of knowledge on par with first contact. Probably would need to be handled sensitively.
With one episode left and no mention of Chekov's Time Machine this week, it may be that we aren't getting a reset button after all. That cheers me somewhat, although it is going to cause canon arguments like crazy.
I think it was on a par with last week overall, albeit with different peaks and troughs, so I'm going to give it another 6. The storyline of this season has really lost my interest since the jump into the MU. Up until Into the Forest I Go, I was giving 7 and 8s, one 9. Since Despite Yourself, I've been giving 5s and 6s. I don't dislike the episodes exactly, but they lack the sort of promise, scope, character interplay, and general interest that they did before the mid season break.
This episode felt like a placeholder, a bridge between the MU arc and the finale. Not a lot happened, exactly, apart from setup. It didn't have any really intense eye rollers like the Lorca stuff last week, but there was little that peaked above average for me. I liked the Genesis device like idea of the Spore moon but it didn't really rise above the level of technobabble. It also struck me as somewhat dangerous that these life forms can take over a moon that fast. They could be a biological weapon in the wrong hands. I'm sure they won't warp off and leave this huge stock of them in the middle of a war zone.
Nice to see Cornwall again, I hoped she was being set up to be the new Captain, but I have a feeling Georgiou is going to fill that seat now. Which is... weird. How many Federation Starships can claim to have been captained by two impostors from the Mirror Universe?
Burnham and Ash... ugh. Just ugh. Not Dawson's Creek, people. However, the Tilly/Burnham scene was nice. I like their friendship, it is, post Lorca, my favourite relationship on the show.
It was nice that Stamets acknowledged Hugh's death this week, and almost made a facial expression about it. Still fairly minimal, and the storyline of the murder is only made more pointless by the fact that the crew all immediately forgive Tyler, presumably setting up his sticking around next year. Culber's murder remains my least favourite bit of this whole season. A dubious and stereotyped idea that was executed with a whimper, not a bang.
Scale of war is an issue in this series. 11,000 here, 80,000 there. Devastating on a personal level, don't get me wrong. But the Federation is enormous. Member worlds of billions. While it helps slot it into the timeline that it isn't actually that significant, it does lower the stakes somewhat. So far, the Great Klingon War is a good way short of wars fought with swords and flintlock rifles in casualties.
I liked the explanation for classifying the existence of the MU - it actually made a lot of sense. The theoretical existence of parallel worlds is presumably known about (it's known about now) but the idea that you can physically travel there would actually be a truly incredible bit of knowledge on par with first contact. Probably would need to be handled sensitively.
With one episode left and no mention of Chekov's Time Machine this week, it may be that we aren't getting a reset button after all. That cheers me somewhat, although it is going to cause canon arguments like crazy.
I don't know how many infractions you need to get the message that these kinds of comments aren't acceptable, but clearly it is at least one more than you have.
Infraction for Trolling, comments to PM.
So, this episode.
I think it was on a par with last week overall, albeit with different peaks and troughs, so I'm going to give it another 6. The storyline of this season has really lost my interest since the jump into the MU. Up until Into the Forest I Go, I was giving 7 and 8s, one 9. Since Despite Yourself, I've been giving 5s and 6s. I don't dislike the episodes exactly, but they lack the sort of promise, scope, character interplay, and general interest that they did before the mid season break.
This episode felt like a placeholder, a bridge between the MU arc and the finale. Not a lot happened, exactly, apart from setup. It didn't have any really intense eye rollers like the Lorca stuff last week, but there was little that peaked above average for me. I liked the Genesis device like idea of the Spore moon but it didn't really rise above the level of technobabble. It also struck me as somewhat dangerous that these life forms can take over a moon that fast. They could be a biological weapon in the wrong hands. I'm sure they won't warp off and leave this huge stock of them in the middle of a war zone.
Nice to see Cornwall again, I hoped she was being set up to be the new Captain, but I have a feeling Georgiou is going to fill that seat now. Which is... weird. How many Federation Starships can claim to have been captained by two impostors from the Mirror Universe?
Burnham and Ash... ugh. Just ugh. Not Dawson's Creek, people. However, the Tilly/Burnham scene was nice. I like their friendship, it is, post Lorca, my favourite relationship on the show.
It was nice that Stamets acknowledged Hugh's death this week, and almost made a facial expression about it. Still fairly minimal, and the storyline of the murder is only made more pointless by the fact that the crew all immediately forgive Tyler, presumably setting up his sticking around next year. Culber's murder remains my least favourite bit of this whole season. A dubious and stereotyped idea that was executed with a whimper, not a bang.
Scale of war is an issue in this series. 11,000 here, 80,000 there. Devastating on a personal level, don't get me wrong. But the Federation is enormous. Member worlds of billions. While it helps slot it into the timeline that it isn't actually that significant, it does lower the stakes somewhat. So far, the Great Klingon War is a good way short of wars fought with swords and flintlock rifles in casualties.
With one episode left and no mention of Chekov's Time Machine this week, it may be that we aren't getting a reset button after all. That cheers me somewhat, although it is going to cause canon arguments like crazy.
They may put the reset button off till next year, or whenever they realise they really can’t resolve everything. Then they will reset something, somewhere.
I like the way they are pedaling their monocycle on the Klingon War issue. It's not pure backpedaling, but more like a tightrope act with a blindfold.
I mean, they really seem to be going in blind, what with their ignorance of AUs and lightyears and whatnot. But what comes out of all that is a plausible little warlet.
- 20 % of the UFP lost is more than France took before collapsing, be it in 1940 or 1870. And about what Russia and later the USSR took before saved by the bell of winter. Bouncing back is obviously possible, but that's a cake they can easily eat and have at the same time.
- Loss of a third of the fighting force is nicely and chillingly explained. That's exactly what the novelty of cloaking would achieve, the same way submarines took the British by surprise and nearly cost them all of Scapa Flow (only the Nazis didn't have antimatter engines to their U-boats, or a suicidal mindset).
- Klingons with cloaks should be capable of attacking any target with utter impunity. Doesn't mean they could win a war that way, any more than the ability to bombard stuff from air with impunity today allows for the winning of wars. The defender would be utterly outclassed, but slow to realize this, and subsequently unlikely to realize that "defending" as a concept was outdated and "attacking" was the way to proceed.
- The advantage in attack would probably indeed be balanced by an inability to coordinate. We hear of extremely low casualties again, but that's only consistent - any "colony" in Trek is petty, the very largest so far being the long-established Deneva with just "nearly a million" folks. And striking at actual homeworlds might be difficult if they have those orbital defences that can cut a thousand ships to pieces, DS9 style: cloaks let you get to your target without Starfleet noticing, but they don't help you deal with the fortresses and gain enough time to deploy that atmosphere-burning stuff familiar from TNG "The Chase"... So the Klingons just take the easy shots and revel in the glory of that.
What I really love, though, is that terraforming stuff. That's just the sort of standard hardware every starship worth the name should be packing, and it's fun to think Stamets' spore cylinders would be standard seed containers fitting into standard slots for standard automated deployment from orbit. Although with nonstandard speed of growth...
Starbase 1 is nice, and it falling to a Klingon faction (with just a handful of people, so they aren't much of an immediate threat) is cool, but it's not just the numbers that don't make much sense: SB1 is actually shown orbiting Earth (you can see Florida down there).
Sarek apparently beamed down to Vulcan. Nowhere do they say they would not be stopping at the place. The transporter room or the adjoining corridor do not have windows showing the ship at warp, either. It's simply the default assumption: Vulcan by default remains unconquered, ships by default stop for transport and then start again, and there was no dialogue about Veda being a destination incompatible with a stop at Vulcan.
I don't think Cornwell made Georgiou a Captain. She just disguised her as one. To what purpose, we do not yet know, as we aren't aware of the specifics of the Evil Plan. But it's simple Implausible Deniability at play, with the Admiral giving less than two shits about whether anybody chooses to believe or not.
So, the plot moves forward, while the ship moves around. It doesn't really bother me whether the character moments are moving or not (although I've personally always liked the awkward Tyler/Burnham thing and especially all their self-deceiving bullshit by which they cope or avoid coping). This part of the season is not about those things, but about taking the events from A to B via various and sometimes (but not necessarily) surprising letters of the alphabet. And I'm fine with that, including with the season finale. Plenty of time to play with the characters later on, now that we have the groundwork in place. It's just about what TNG and DS9 got done in their initial seasons anyway, and more than ENT did.
Timo Saloniemi
I mean, they really seem to be going in blind, what with their ignorance of AUs and lightyears and whatnot. But what comes out of all that is a plausible little warlet.
- 20 % of the UFP lost is more than France took before collapsing, be it in 1940 or 1870. And about what Russia and later the USSR took before saved by the bell of winter. Bouncing back is obviously possible, but that's a cake they can easily eat and have at the same time.
- Loss of a third of the fighting force is nicely and chillingly explained. That's exactly what the novelty of cloaking would achieve, the same way submarines took the British by surprise and nearly cost them all of Scapa Flow (only the Nazis didn't have antimatter engines to their U-boats, or a suicidal mindset).
- Klingons with cloaks should be capable of attacking any target with utter impunity. Doesn't mean they could win a war that way, any more than the ability to bombard stuff from air with impunity today allows for the winning of wars. The defender would be utterly outclassed, but slow to realize this, and subsequently unlikely to realize that "defending" as a concept was outdated and "attacking" was the way to proceed.
- The advantage in attack would probably indeed be balanced by an inability to coordinate. We hear of extremely low casualties again, but that's only consistent - any "colony" in Trek is petty, the very largest so far being the long-established Deneva with just "nearly a million" folks. And striking at actual homeworlds might be difficult if they have those orbital defences that can cut a thousand ships to pieces, DS9 style: cloaks let you get to your target without Starfleet noticing, but they don't help you deal with the fortresses and gain enough time to deploy that atmosphere-burning stuff familiar from TNG "The Chase"... So the Klingons just take the easy shots and revel in the glory of that.
What I really love, though, is that terraforming stuff. That's just the sort of standard hardware every starship worth the name should be packing, and it's fun to think Stamets' spore cylinders would be standard seed containers fitting into standard slots for standard automated deployment from orbit. Although with nonstandard speed of growth...
Starbase 1 is nice, and it falling to a Klingon faction (with just a handful of people, so they aren't much of an immediate threat) is cool, but it's not just the numbers that don't make much sense: SB1 is actually shown orbiting Earth (you can see Florida down there).
Sarek apparently beamed down to Vulcan. Nowhere do they say they would not be stopping at the place. The transporter room or the adjoining corridor do not have windows showing the ship at warp, either. It's simply the default assumption: Vulcan by default remains unconquered, ships by default stop for transport and then start again, and there was no dialogue about Veda being a destination incompatible with a stop at Vulcan.
I don't think Cornwell made Georgiou a Captain. She just disguised her as one. To what purpose, we do not yet know, as we aren't aware of the specifics of the Evil Plan. But it's simple Implausible Deniability at play, with the Admiral giving less than two shits about whether anybody chooses to believe or not.
So, the plot moves forward, while the ship moves around. It doesn't really bother me whether the character moments are moving or not (although I've personally always liked the awkward Tyler/Burnham thing and especially all their self-deceiving bullshit by which they cope or avoid coping). This part of the season is not about those things, but about taking the events from A to B via various and sometimes (but not necessarily) surprising letters of the alphabet. And I'm fine with that, including with the season finale. Plenty of time to play with the characters later on, now that we have the groundwork in place. It's just about what TNG and DS9 got done in their initial seasons anyway, and more than ENT did.
Timo Saloniemi
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There are no "warriors" compatible with the UFP. They don't even make decent soldiers. They're pretty much inept when it comes to warfighting, as the Dominion War showed. United Earth was far better at it, while still upholding the core values the Federation would inherit. They really should have kept Starfleet separate from the military.
Fortunately, Star Trek isn't about soldiers or fighting wars, even though war has been depicted on the show.
You're right. The Prime Directive doesn't apply. They don't even hold themselves to it, when it becomes inconvenient, so why should it matter in this instance?
I'm aware of this, and it DOES NOT APPLY. Our real-world international politics, and even their interstellar politics, cannot encompass what we're talking about here. We're not talking about prosecuting someone from a different location. We're talking about prosecuting someone from a different universe. I get that this is science fiction and all and is supposed to be allegory for human institutions, but come on. That's still not a light distinction. It's pretty much akin to the factions in the Temporal Cold War or the Krenim trying to mold entire timelines to fit their vision, except worse.
Think of it like this: if I were a member of an advanced species and I found out there was another out there so arrogant (because, no matter what they say, the Federation is basically run by one species--Homo sapiens) as to think they could extend their justice system between universes--when they themselves weren't being threatened in any way--I would move to have them--at the very least--permanently contained. When might they decide they don't like the way you do things? When might they decide to try to butt in your affairs? They would be a menace.
***
EDIT: Something just occurred to me. Burnham is guilty of kidnapping. Not only kidnapping, but kidnapping a head of state. You can't even construe it as apprehension--Burnham has no police authority whatsoever. She's not even a proper member of Starfleet anymore. It's also not akin to a "citizen's arrest", since they're not members of the same polity. She should be apprehended by MU military police thrown in an agony booth for the rest of her (long) life.
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