Spoilers Star Trek: Short Treks 1x02 - "Calypso"

[Mudd]

The whole point of Star Trek was that you could tell any kind of story you want, and bring it into the Star Trek universe. If it's a story worth telling, find a way to tell it.

Exactly so. TOS was a lot of things besides a story about a spaceship.

If the choice is between a great story and canon, canon should be thrown overboard without hesitation. The frequent insistence on doing the opposite is one big reason that after 50 years Trek is so empty and uninteresting.

 

[Tuskin38]

From "Battle of the Binary Stars" the computers in Disco have been smart. I can buy 1000 years evolving the reasoning computer Burnham talked into freeing her from the Shenzhou brig into Zora.

The computers in TOS were like that too. It was TNG that dumbed it down.

but still make me some mental noise that the Discovery technology is so far advanced than even the Voyager or the Sovereign class on the 24 century.

I don’t see how it’s more advanced.

 

[eschaton]

Okay, that was great. Much, much better than anything I've seen out of Discovery to date. And as others have noted, it was a nice idea to have Craft come from a non-Federation human culture, because it got around a lot of the inevitable complaints about "continuity errors" which would occur if it was some random guy from Earth in the 33rd century.

My one, and perhaps only, complaint is the editing seemed a bit jerky a times. I understand they were trying to show the passage of considerable time (months at least) and the development of their relationship, but it felt like there were a few too many scenes which took up less than a minute.

 

[Tim Thomason]

It is.

By the by, Alcor is real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_and_Alcor
http://galaxymap.org/dr2/index.html?search=Alcor&tileset=SGD&distanceEstimator=bj
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=g UMa

Interestingly, Mizar II (home of the Mizarians) was a planet that had been conquered a half dozen times before the 24th century. It's less than half a light year from Alcor and technically part of the same overall system.

Chabon, by coincidence or design, placed Craft's homeworld in a place known for territorial disputes.

 

[Tuskin38]

This may have been posted already, an interview with Chabon.

https://ca.ign.com/articles/2018/11...apting-the-odyssey-rethinking-picard-and-more

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

it was a nice idea to have Craft come from a non-Federation human culture

Indeed. Craft said that his people were fighting an enemy called the V'draysh. That name sounds a lot like 'Federation' (or what that word might sound like after 1000 years of language drift).

Edit: Just checked Memory Alpha...Chabon says that it's intentional. Didn't say whether the V'draysh actually are the Federation, or if they just took the word, like they did so many relics from long ago.

 

[DEWLine]

That escape pod user interface looked suspiciously familiar, too. No?

 

[Galaxy]

If the choice is between a great story and canon, canon should be thrown overboard without hesitation.

Is it really too much to ask for both?

For me the canon is part of what I like about Star Trek* there are very few fantasy worlds that have such a rich tapestry., and I love how the novelverse ties into that, especially the very tightly knit DS9/TNG relaunch books. The Lord of the Rings is up there, and I know it caused many people to put away the books, but I love how Tolkien gives us a thorough history lesson of regions and towns along the journey. Star War is good example as well, especially if you add in the - now mostly relegated to Legends - books. Harry Potter, and George Martin's Game of Thrones would be two more modern examples.

* as I have stated before I do make a distinction between visual and story canon. When it comes to things like the Klingon look I am more open to them changing things.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

So... now we know the fate of the Discovery.

Not necessarily. Zora stated that she was ordered to remain where she was pending the crew's return. Now that could mean they left the ship for some reason and something happened to them offscreen that will prevent them from ever returning. Or there could be some time travel shenanigans going on and they parked the ship in a region where it could stay out of sight for a thousand years until they returned to retrieve it and bring it back to their original time.

Good episode, but still make me some mental noise that the Discovery technology is so far advanced than even the Voyager or the Sovereign class on the 24 century.

It's not. The TNG, Voyager, and Sovereign Class holodecks create a hybrid of holograms, forcefields, and actual replicated matter (when need be) that could be used as bullets to kill a Borg or food to eat or snowballs that can be thrown outside the holodeck (In TNG. It can't make Moriarty a fully functioning humanoid lifeform outside yet though). The hologram here at best had some mild tactile feedback (either through ultrasonic means or ionized air or otherwise) to give you a fuzzy boundary of where to place your hands in a dance routine but still allow you to fully walk through the hologram without difficulty. Notice that Craft had to practice the moves precisely to know where to stand and place his hands in the air before doing the final dance with Zora.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

It's interesting that Alcor's original Arabic name of Suhā/Sohā, means "the ‘forgotten’ or ‘neglected’ one", which could be the reason for the war between the Federation and the colony. It has shades of the Terra Nova colony on Enterprise, the TNG - Masterpiece Society colony, the Maquis, or Balthazar Edison's surviving crew in ST:Beyond being resentful of the Federation.

 

[Galaxy]

Not necessarily. Zora stated that she was ordered to remain where she was pending the crew's return.(...)Or there could be some time travel shenanigans going on and they parked the ship in a region where it could stay out of sight for a thousand years until they returned to retrieve it and bring it back to their original time.

I looked at the Season 2 trailer again. First of, Michael speaks of "a secret made of space and time" so some shenanigans are going on. Also, it is mentioned that they are on a collision course with a pulsar. A pulsar produces similar time dilation effects to a black hole. So it is possible that they are doing something similar to Andromeda, where they are frozen in time, except that they are seperated from the ship, hence Discovery being told to hold station to pick them up.

 

[Tuskin38]

According to the interview with the writer it sounds like the 1000 years has nothing to do with season 2, in fact he said he was initially worried 1000 years was too long, but no one objected to it.

 

[Mudd]

Is it really too much to ask for both?

Yes, for a number of reasons that have been discussed ad nauseam on this board over the years.

Perfect continuity and "canon" are mostly a fixation on the part of some hard-core Trek fans. It's just not important to the quality of storytelling. Some people claim that professional writers who won't adhere to it are "lazy," but the opposite is true: privileging continuity as if it's a key element of the fiction leads eventually to lazy fill-in-the-blank plotting of the kind that - not by accident - dominates fan films.

In essence, when "canon" concerns dominate the result is a long, unfunny in-joke.

If "Calypso" is a good hour of storytelling, its putative violations of continuity mean nothing.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

A subtle and interesting juxtaposition of roles in the episode was that the computer that was the embodiment of the craft was given a more personalized name, while the actual human concealed his identity and was nicknamed "Craft". It served to further humanize Zora.

 

[Galaxy]

Btw. the ship developing a consciousness reminds me of Star Trek: Continues "Still Threads the Shadow" where the Constitution class Defiant develops a consciousness after 200 years.

If "Calypso" is a good hour of storytelling, its putative violations of continuity mean nothing.

Imo Calypso does not violate anything, and I gave it a 10.

 

[PositronicNet]

Absolutely amazing! Love the mystery and unknowns surrounding the story. Sometimes episodes can get caught up in staying canon, I think it’s why ST movies don’t relate to regular audiences. Calypso shows Trek hasen’t forgotten great science fiction, the stuff that could stand alone and still tug at your heart days later. Tilly’s adventure was cute, but this left me craving more Trek in an unhealthy way. Can’t wait for more!

 

[Awesome Possum]

I'm a shill for CBS. They pay me millions to love the show. They have a lot of money and spend it on all kinds of crazy things, like pay me to post on a website for over a decade.

 

[Vger23]

I'm a shill for CBS. They pay me millions to love the show. They have a lot of money and spend it on all kinds of crazy things, like pay me to post on a website for over a decade.

We all work for CBS. Every single person who votes 7 or above is a plant. It's the only explanation as to why people don't see the truth about how bad everything is.

 

[Mirror Mirror]

We all work for CBS. Every single person who votes 7 or above is a plant. It's the only explanation as to why people don't see the truth about how bad everything is.

Its 5 and above man. Maybe even 4.

 

[Borgminister]

We all work for CBS. Every single person who votes 7 or above is a plant.

Well, I do vegetate.