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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x14 - "The War Without, The War Within"

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BTW one thing I really hated (and hate in general - looking at you Peter Hamilton and your sci-fi multi-novel series) was the deus ex machina - in this case suddenly being able to grow a shedload of spores out of the blue. Sloppy sloppy writing.

Yeah. In episodic drama, it's fine to create a crisis and then resolve it in a single episode (or within two). However, in serialized drama actions should have longer-term ramifications. Otherwise there is no purpose to serialization at all.
 
BTW one thing I really hated (and hate in general - looking at you Peter Hamilton and your sci-fi multi-novel series) was the deus ex machina - in this case suddenly being able to grow a shedload of spores out of the blue. Sloppy sloppy writing.
I thought it was reasonable that Stamets and his dead colleague had backup plans for growing spokes. My wife remarked the spore growing scene was Genesis like. I liked it.

The scientist on the Glenn wasn't even growing his own forest on board, so he must have had some method for making more.
 
I thought it was reasonable that Stamets and his dead colleague had backup plans for growing spokes. My wife remarked the spore growing scene was Genesis like. I liked it.

The scientist on the Glenn wasn't even growing his own forest on board, so he must have had some method for making more.

I don't mind the backup plan per se and it's logical that there was some backup, as you say - merely that there was not even an in passing reference to a "plan B" by Stamets in earlier episodes. As @eschaton says, that's fine in an episodic format, but a serialised format like this should give us a heads up...preferably some very subtle off-the-cuff remark from earlier in the season that would have got us all more material to debate the significance of ;)
 
Tyler should be fine. He may have lost a girlfriend, but he has the entire bridge crew and Tilly all on his side as the best of friends. Despite the fact that he's a surgically altered Klingon saboteur, with the false memories of a dead Starfleet officer, and who murdered one of their crewmates. And everyone knows this. Even Stamets is coming around.

I guess it pays to look like Shazad Latif.
 
yeah, 80,000 dead is not even the size of a small town in the USA. For an intergalatic war that should not make your side 'desparate'.
They are making me root for the Klingons.

It's about the size of the Hiroshima civilian casualties. I think the 80,000 might refer to the Starfleet brass and admiralty. It being Starbase 1, it was a possibly unplanned decapitation strike on Starfleet, who might not have much senior leadership (although they should have plenty hunkered down at Earth HQ).
 
It's about the size of the Hiroshima civilian casualties. I think the 80,000 might refer to the Starfleet brass and admiralty. It being Starbase 1, it was a possibly unplanned decapitation strike on Starfleet, who might not have much senior leadership (although they should have plenty hunkered down at Earth HQ).

Which makes Starfleet as an organisation too small to represent hundreds of worlds and trillions of beings. Assuming Starbase 1 is not that far from Earth it would be more effective to strike Jupiter station and the Utopia Planetia shipyards.
Well, at least the writers are sticking with the Star Trek tradition of 'small universe syndrome' lol
 
It's about the size of the Hiroshima civilian casualties. I think the 80,000 might refer to the Starfleet brass and admiralty. It being Starbase 1, it was a possibly unplanned decapitation strike on Starfleet, who might not have much senior leadership (although they should have plenty hunkered down at Earth HQ).

I think people have this idea that in the future, an intergalactic society is somehow so large that 80k dead just doesn't have the same impact when you hear it. I doubt human beings are going to be that desensitized. You're right it was probably a lot of personnel, but even if it wasn't, just a settlement on a moon, I think it would matter.

especially if they were being beaten back and are far less in numbers.
 
I hope we haven't permanently passed the possibility of having another "two-hour movie event" Star Trek episode. Would have loved last night's & next week's to have done this. Personally feel this is something Voyager did right.
 
The number of Americans lost in the early days of the War in the Pacific was small compared to the population of the US at home, but each island grab and each sunk American ship gave the Japanese Empire strategic gains. They were not yet ready to bomb and land troops on the west coast, but there certainly was a time when it was dire.

To complete the analogy. Burnham thinks that she's orchestrating Jimmy Dolittle's Raid over Toyko to change moral and shift the balance, but she's about to do a nuclear attack.
 
The number of Americans lost in the early days of the War in the Pacific was small compared to the population of the US at home, but each island grab and each sunk American ship gave the Japanese Empire strategic gains. ....

I agree and think this may be the key point. Starfleet may quote lives lost as the key factor, but you can bet it's strategic factors that were most on their minds. Though the economics of ST may be different I'll bet the "media punch" factor hasn't changed to such a degree - hence the lives lost emphasis!
 
yeah, 80,000 dead is not even the size of a small town in the USA. For an intergalatic war that should not make your side 'desparate'.
They are making me root for the Klingons.

Though as I said at the top of the thread, Trek has always effed this up, showing colony planets and the like to be very under-inhabited. No one seems to understand how exponential population growth works. Like, a colony founded with only 10,000 inhabitants will have, presuming 3% growth, 187,000 residents a century later. Presuming it's cheap and easy to transport people in the Federation, and the birth rate on colonial planets is reasonably high, there should be many colonies with millions of inhabitants by the 23rd century.
 
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