And that's totally fine if one wants to waste time on that because one has 45 minutes to fill but just 20 minutes of actual story. Luckily DSC episodes are higher paced with tighter scripts
What Has Discovery Added To Star Trek Lore?
- Thread starter Kane_Steel
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The explicit point in all those was that there was a starship at one end. In "Metamorphosis", Kirk was warping out to meet Scotty in order to reach his ultimate destination. In "Galileo Seven", a rare starship sortie brought the four Murasaki systems to within shuttlecraft range. And in "The Menagerie", the attempt at going interstellar nearly killed Kirk.
But it's not the existence of interstellar shuttle flight that I'm disappointed with here. It's the implied ubiquitousness, and the utterly exceptional way it is used, making a starship reachable at any and all situations and locations. What's the point of having a ship in the first place when people get to places without her?
And why were those long? Because they were sublight flights, with "impulse stars" outside, and with explicit insystem destinations. They don't relate to the issue at hand.
... or has a possible nearby Vulcan Cruiser come pick him up. They do seem to be all over the place during this time period. A quick rendezvous would only take a minute or two to transport him over.
Which is the problem I see, rather than a solution. No other show had such picking up take place. I do dare you to come up with even one example comparable to Sarek's odd jumping-the-ships.
This is not tighter writing. It's looser writing, similar to the "floating date" trope where people agree to meet "In France next week". The comings and goings are left without a story justification when there is no excuse for the mechanism of them happening. If Sarek can come and go, why do the heroes ever suffer from lack of access to a character? A decade later Sarek needs Vulcan blood to survive. Why doesn't it arrive fresh from Vulcan? Or Kirk needs somebody to stop his ship from careening madly across the universe. Why doesn't Starfleet send this somebody? When the time comes to pay Vulcan a visit, what does Spock need with a starship?
All the previous sets of writers treated starships as the vehicles that took the heroes places. Shuttles did not reach them en route; it took a bump in the road to achieve that. Even fellow starships didn't deliver visitors while the heroes traveled at warp from A to B. Arranging for a rendezvous was a big, big scheduling thing.
It's a characteristic DSC has added to the Trek universe. But it's a problematic one because it doesn't easily fit the 23rd century context, or the 22nd or 24th century ones, which were still written with the mentality that a starship in flight was like an airliner in flight, not a parade float to hop on or off.
Timo Saloniemi
Sorry, Timo, but you're just nit-picking way beyond the usual kinda Nits.
I get that it bothers you, but I'd rather spend time trying to 'Explain' why something seems off, than constantly pointing out that it is.
For me, it's a lot more fun building something up with semi-logical explanations, than tearing it apart with negative conclusions.
I get that it bothers you, but I'd rather spend time trying to 'Explain' why something seems off, than constantly pointing out that it is.
For me, it's a lot more fun building something up with semi-logical explanations, than tearing it apart with negative conclusions.
Welcome to 21st century Star Trek.Sorry, Timo, but you're just nit-picking way beyond the usual kinda Nits.
I get that it bothers you, but I'd rather spend time trying to 'Explain' why something seems off, than constantly pointing out that it is.
For me, it's a lot more fun building something up with semi-logical explanations, than tearing it apart with negative conclusions.
The shuttle journeys in TNG are explicitly at warp, or they make NO sense. Geordi is on his way back from a conference on a Federation world. He's ambushed by a Romulan Warbird. If he's at impulse, they just decloaked within a Federation system... the distance to the edge of OURS is 1.87 light years (to the Oort Cloud). Heck, even Pluto takes 4.5 hours at Warp 1, and Geordi is bored enough he's already hitting the computer up for samba rhythms. But the option of hailing any local vessels for assistance doesn't come up, nor does anyone notice the Warbird. Expressly, this is meant to take place in interstellar space.
Now the DSC shuttles suddenly seeming to have Warp 5 capability is a bit of a stretch - the whole point of the Runabouts in DS9 was to be faster than standard shuttles.
Now the DSC shuttles suddenly seeming to have Warp 5 capability is a bit of a stretch - the whole point of the Runabouts in DS9 was to be faster than standard shuttles.
To carry lots of specialized equipment and crew, to provide an environment for people to comfortably live and work in, to fight battles if necessary etc.
Aeh, it's just a carry over from the 20th Century.
Folks have been doing this to some degree or another since the advent of the Trek movies.
Back then we did it in person, face-to-face at conventions (and even then, it was not always cordial), now it's just completely off-the-wall at times cause it's so impersonal.
For me the most important things it adds are that:
- Philippa Georgiou and Michael Burnham are the most legendary Starfleet officers who ever served
- It's okay to be grossly insubordinate and disrespectful to your Captain, as long as it doesn't cross over into mutiny
- Section 31 isn't secret; everyone in the future just has terrible memory
- Philippa Georgiou and Michael Burnham are the most legendary Starfleet officers who ever served
- It's okay to be grossly insubordinate and disrespectful to your Captain, as long as it doesn't cross over into mutiny
- Section 31 isn't secret; everyone in the future just has terrible memory
Also known as the Kirk maneuver.
Must also be why they forgot about smooth head Klingons and androids.
Stupid Wiki edits.
Well, it's something of a Mirror Universe moment for me, too - I usually go for the bullshit rationalizations rather than the embarrassing author errors as well. It's just that
a) there's nothing to rationalize here until somebody bitches about it, so I sort of feel duty-bound, and
b) this thread is about novel phenomena, and here we have one...
But he explicitly is (the stars are still, and there's no dropping-out-of-warp dialogue or alert or shake or whatnot). And they did. This is not contested.
Furthermore, he's traveling in the one TNG spacecraft that has been labeled as warp-incapable onscreen, the tiny Type 15 shuttlepod...
Nope, insystem, for the reasons you state: it's a short hop of a few hours at sublight.
If Klingons can deliver Picard and Data to the Romulan homeworld under cloak, surely the Romulans can return the courtesy here?
...And even their performance was limited to below warp five, as per "Dax".
But the DSC shuttles need not necessarily be starship-fast. It's just that this random movement of characters would then mean the starship herself is making odd detours. Or, alternately, that other starships are bending over backwards to accommodate the transfers. Which may well explain some of Sarek's movements, since he's a VIP warranting the treatment (especially during his odder jumps such as in "War Without"), although not all of them (if he really jumps ship in "Brother", we have to choose between the Scylla of him bailing out at high warp and the Charybdis of him bailing out in a hail of sharp rocks).
Personally, I'd prefer believing in ship rendezvouses, even though DSC visuals are woefully lacking there. When Cornwell arrives in her "cruiser" for "Lethe", no, this is not a fancy name for her shuttle - she just happens to be old school and shuttles over, instead of transporting over. When Number One beams over in "Obol", the ship is right next to Spacedock, allowing Nhan and Reno to also beam over at their leisure before the ship again gets underway. But DSC VFX is cheap (read: expensive and often late), so we fail to see key visuals. Which is nothing new, as TNG also was pure tell-not-show more often than not. Here we just have to do the telling, too...
As for Section 31, there's plenty of time for the organization to fake its death before DS9 rolls along...
Timo Saloniemi
I can’t say I ever gave much thought to any of that beyond “Sarek got off at some point”.
You know, one of the ways in which the Trek format struggles with being dated is that we're about two generations past the era where most of the potential audience either has experience with or relates sympathetically to military discipline and organization.
The important turning point for just about every protagonist who is part of an organization in a blockbuster movie is that moment when he or she rebels and defies orders to Do What's Right, Dammit!
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TV and movies are very different animals, however. Which is why even seeming dated the Trek format still works fine, as also seen in the 5 year run of The Last Ship and to a lesser extent in the copious number of police procedurals on the air.
- Georgiou is well known and renowned in her time (even before her brave death) and may carry over into the future, as are Kirk, Spock, Picard, Archer, Sisko, Janeway, Sulu, Riker, etc. It's not unusual for Trek leads or even peripheral characters. Hell, Janeway was very familiar with Captain Ransom's record as a minor living legend, and he was just on a dinky planetary survey ship. Starfleet is a mutual admiration society that promotes the achievements of its senior officers to inspire junior officers and cadets.
- Riker to Jellico, Chuckles to Janeway, Spock or Data on numerous occasions. Also, how was it okay when she was relieved of duty and sent to prison and disgraced and distrusted, all of which she had to work her way back out of?
- How many secret intelligence organizations from 120-220 years ago do you think the average person in Starfleet who is not a military or intelligence historian is familiar with, especially if they have actively expunged their records at some point? Granted, it stretches credibility a bit that Julian is not aware of them since he's a spy geek and has a genetically engineered super intellect, but still.
Kirk only did it when he had good reason to, or when the other person was being a dick. Compare that to how Michael Burnham (and now, more recently, Saru) interact with their superior officers in nearly EVERY EPISODE.
What Kirk got away with seemed very implausible, in the days that the show first aired, to anyone who took the military aspects of the show seriously. There was always an awful lot of hand-waving going on.
Spock fucking stole a spaceship and committed a capital offense, one week. Starfleet was cool with it. Wasn't even a board of inquiry.
One can argue, I suppose, that the writers are taking the easy way out by using rebellion against authority as a dramatic device too often and too easily on STD - but it's real hard to sell the idea that this isn't in the oldest traditions of Star Trek.
One of the funniest moments of TNG was Picard chewing out Worf about violating his Star Fleet duty in Reunion. I thought Worf should have responded with 'When did Star Fleet start worrying about that?'
I guess, what I'm getting at, is that Discovery has ramped up the routine insubordination to a distracting level, even by Star Trek standards. Week after week, Burnham slaps Pike around with no repercussions at all (even though in his original portrayal, he was depicted as authoritarian to the point that his crew seemed kinda afraid of him), and this week Saru got in on the act in a way that had extreme consequences, and nobody blinked an eye. That's a departure from previous Treks in a considerable measure.
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