Some bits of catch-up on the thread...
In the begining of the season, 7 signals appeared light years away from each other. Now another red signal appears over a klingon Time crystal monastery. Wouldnt that make it 8?
This ambiguity has been bothering me for a while now. Seven signals appeared across the galaxy "simultaneously" (or at least, timed to be perceived simultaneously by Federation sensors), no? We've seen them all arrayed on a holo-map. Yet in this episode (and not for the first time), we get dialogue about not knowing when or where the next one(s) will appear, and having to wait to find out. What's that all about?
They have made Pike into the Finest damned Captain the show has ever had. He knew his fate and sealed it for the greater good.
In this "outing", we find out that Pike seals his own fate by choosing to take the time crystal. That alone is something we did not know before and it's pretty significant.
Was his decision courageous? Yes, absolutely. But I dislike the aspect of it you both highlight here, because "fate" is simply not something any Starfleet captain should believe in. The future is not yet written. The fact that
we (the audience) know that Pike will wind up in that chair doesn't mean there's any reason at all that
he should accept it as inevitable. There are also the very dark implications of Pike having to go through the next several years of his life with this hanging over his head. For these reasons and more, I agree with the poster who suggested it would've been far better to have Pike's "memories" of the future fade once he left the monastery.
Did I misunderstand the scene in the episode? I was expecting him to save cadets, but we only see him attempt a single rescue and it ends in failure…
I thought much the same thing. Which, IMHO, is one more reason that even
we can't assume the future is "fixed" to transpire exactly as seen.
The keeper of the Time Crystals said the visions always come true.
And, so what? He's a monk (and one with
extremely limited life experience), not a scientist. He may or may not believe what he says, but either way that doesn't make it true.
Trying to avoid the event is also the type of meddling with the timeline that Starfleet doesn't like, hence why the Defiant will still be sent on it's mission in 10 years.
I rather prefer to think the Starfleet brass doesn't believe in fate, either. How much detailed info were they actually able to keep from the records discovered in the MU? If it's enough to actually prevent something, as opposed to a more general "the
Defiant gets stuck in the past of the MU at some unspecified time and place for uncertain reasons," then that's a gaping and really unfortunate plot hole.
If Control/[not]The Borg can do the grey goo thing why does it even bother with humanoid bodies, or have the need to assimilate folks by plunging in tubules?
Damn good question. (Right up there with wondering why it didn't just stun both Spock and Burnham at the first opportunity, and take her over in peace and quiet, rather than trying to play out the longer con.)
And I don't know if anyone else noticed, but it felt like the writers were revisiting some earlier themes in terms of destiny, faith vs science and how everything is connected.
Oh, I definitely noticed. Some bits of it worked better than others, IMHO. Any treatment of these themes that suggests our characters
don't have free will is unfortunate indeed.
I honestly just saw 'Point of Light' as a wrap up of the season one Klingon stuff and as a way to get Tyler onto Discovery. I love how that episode became so important to the seasons overall plot and that when we get to see 'Son of none' again he's a grown man, duty bound to guard the Time Crystal and guide a starfleet captain towards his destiny. I would never have predicted that in a million years. I feel like a lot more planning has gone into this season than we're giving the writers credit for.
Conversely, I think the reason none of us would have predicted that is that it wasn't planned... it was originally meant to wrap that story, as you surmised, and the "connection" was kludged together
ex post facto by the writers after the mid-season redirect. The time crystal planet could've been anywhere, and even if it were Boreth the monk in charge could've been anyone, but no, given half a chance, they
had to go and make it someone with a direct connection to our characters. Small Universe Syndrome strikes again.
Maybe I missed something, but why did they not just jump away at the end? In "New Eden" they jumped some Voyager-distance into the Beta Quadrant! I don't understand why they don't just jump away from the 31 ships and go hide in the corner of the galaxy somewhere.
That's a really excellent question. No need even to hide, really... just jump to any convenient Starbase with enough of a head start over the S31 ships to give
Discovery time to offload the crew and destroy the ship (or even just EMP it) to eliminate the Sphere data. They just used the spore drive to get to Boreth in this
very same episode, under far less urgent circumstances, so obviously it's working and they're not trying to avoid using it.
And indeed, why fight the S31 ships? They're all there, just sporejump fuck away. ... Introducing magic super tech is perilous, and it is really stupid that they forgot the capabilities of their own ship.
To be fair, though, they seem to have forgotten how to use
transporters more than once in recent episodes when it would've been Really Really Helpful...
Nice big fight is being set up, would be nice if the Klingons show up as well.
You know, that's an interesting point, in multiple ways. Given that the (unnecessary) fight is obviously going to happen anyway, it would be cool to see the Klingons get involved in it, especially now that they know the stakes.
More ominously, though, it reminds me of something I goggled at during the episode, which is
why were they allowed to know the stakes? The Federation was just involved in open war with this extremely paranoid and militaristic empire not three months ago, and here's Pike personally telling the Chancellor of that empire that all intelligent life is endangered because of a threat that Starfleet originated, and that an entire branch of Starfleet Intelligence has been corrupted, including all the details of how?
Did he bother to clear this with higher-ups first?
After all, given that Control's plot seems to hinge on the Sphere data aboard
Discovery, why wouldn't the Klingons immediately conclude that blowing the ship out of the sky would be a Really Good Idea?
Personally I would have blown the ship to kingdom come as soon as I knew I couldn't delete the data.
Exactly. You thought of it, I thought of it, we all thought of it... so why didn't Pike (or L'Rell!) think of it?
Boreth is one of my favourite locations thus far in Discovery. It's a welcome return to the no-fucks-given-this-is-fantasy worlds of TOS and TAS.
I am baffled by the concept you express here. I liked Boreth too... but that's because of its depiction of a different aspect of Klingon culture, not the fantasy elements. TOS was never at any point fantasy... nor would I ever want it to be. It wasn't exactly
hard SF either, to be sure... but it was still a damn sight harder than any SF that had been on TV previously, and most that's been on since. Perhaps you're thinking of
Star Wars?
The Time Keeper pretty much said, whatever Pike sees in the vision is the price he pays for receiving the time crystal. That future is already set in motion and if it's become a fixed point in time then there is no avoiding it.
And perhaps you're thinking of
Doctor Who? "Fixed points in time" only exist in that franchise, not this one.
Yeah, right! … And J. Michael Stracynski's Babylon-5 wasn't a rip off of Deep Space 9. ... I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell anyone who buys that load of hooey.
Speaking of other franchises... sorry you'll have to sell your favorite bridge, but B5
wasn't a rip-off of DS9. Indeed I've never heard anyone even suggest that; if anything, the evidence suggests
the opposite was the case. JMS pitched B5 to Paramount (and they rejected it) before he took it to Warners, after all, well before either show went into development.
(And as much as I appreciate DS9 as the best of the latter-day Trek series, when all is said and done there's no denying that B5 was a better and more sophisticated show overall.)
All you need is a starship and an intermix formula or a slingshot around a star to travel in time. Failing that, you can travel to the Guardian of Forever and jump through a hole in wall. There's also the Orb of Time. Anytime prior to 2269 a trip to Sarpeidon could do the trick.
The Guardian was a big deal because of the time travel aspect. The Orb of Time is not a natural mineral deposit; it’s a sophisticated piece of technology from another universe. The slingshot is the most perplexing one...but you do need a warp-capable civilization, with sturdy enough a ship, and some sophisticated math (also a way to recrystallize dilithium if you’d like to return to wherever). In the literature the Reeves-Stevenses I think in the DS9 Millennium Trilogy came up with a reason it’s more complex than that too or more peoples would attempt/succeed at it.
Yes, it damn well is nice, because it shows that at least
some writers (even if it's the franchised novel writers and not the show writers) take the trouble to try to keep the fictional reality plausible and consistent. CLB in his DTI novels has also done a yeoman job of making sense of some of Trek's more outlandish and/or reality-threatening time travel incidents. And some of the examples you mention aren't even problematic in the first place, as
@Arpy details. I don't understand your interest here in making excuses for the
less-careful writers and disdaining the better ones.
For a whole lot of youse, DSC's being ok with being just a bit less sciency-feeling (Tilly's outbursts about science aside) and a bit more fantasy-esque is either ok, or a good thing. … And it's not at all a deal breaker for me. Just not how I'd prefer it. I'd like my nonsense to look and sound more plausible, please!
Hear, hear. (It's not
yet a deal-breaker for me, but I can easily imagine how it could be.)
Because it's a science fiction series, not a fantasy series.
Quite so. Unfortunately, we're living in a culture where a lot of people (both audience and creatives) have been raised on
Star Wars, and many of them think it's actually SF. It's not and never has been, of course; it's high fantasy hiding behind a tissue-thin veneer of space opera tropes. That's why it's simply Not As Good As Star Trek, and never can be. (And that's also why a SW fan like Abrams was such an awful choice for the Trek reboot films. But I digress...)
Going through this thread, I feel reminded of the red matter complaints some people had ten years back. The time crystals are, like the red matter, phlebotinum. They're there to help the plot move forward. Their designation is completely irrelevant to their storytelling function. Why get hung up on something this inconsequential?
It's a storytelling tool like any other.
You're both wrong, because it's
not inconsequential. When you're telling a story, using a plot device that calls attention to its status
as a plot device is bad storytelling. It ruins the illusion. That's the consequence. (Very occasionally you can get away with hanging a lampshade on this sort of thing, like Cameron did with "unobtanium" in
Avatar, but that's a risky play.) Would you be equally copacetic if Mama Burnham were wearing a Plot Device Suit powered by Plot Device Crystals? Because right now they're getting
awfully close to that...
With all due respect, that's cherry-picking. Trek has had loads of phlebotinum plot devices that are firmly rooted in fantasy territory since forever. Like something or don't (nobody needs a reason or excuse for personal taste), but there's no need to retcon history.
Doing nothing of the sort. As already noted, Trek has never been
hard SF, but it's certainly been more SF than fantasy, from the very beginning, without question. The original creators took great pains to come up with a plausible explanation for FTL travel (rather than just using rockets) and a way to power it (antimatter annihilation), for instance, and more generally to avoid any and all traces of the supernatural in the show.
Since
Star Trek first aired, media depictions of genre material have occasionally leaned toward harder SF (as in
2001, at least until its final scenes, and a few others) and more often leaned further away from it (
Star Wars and too many other examples to mention). Trek doesn't need to try to emulate the former, but it
certainly shouldn't try to emulate the latter. It just needs to stay within its own self-selected conceptual boundaries. Over the years it's (mostly) done a pretty decent job of that, but when it does look to be stepping outside them, it's perfectly fair for fans to point that out.
No, all they need is some silly technobabble to fix that just like the rest of Trek.
If you really think so little of Trek, why do you bother with it?
I don't need help because Star Trek is full of fake tech and fantasy tech that doesn't bother me. I'm not going to pretend it's scientific in any way.
The point some of us are trying to make is that there's a meaningful boundary between "fake tech" and "fantasy," and it's a mistake to step over it.
TNG had god-like beings with omnipotent powers over space-time. That's ok as long as we're just told they are advanced aliens, right?
Yes, and that's a critical distinction. The day Trek tells a story that requires the audience to accept the existence of actual deities is the day the franchise permanently and irrevocably jumps the shark.
I don't like it, and certainly, don't support it. But, it doesn't break immersion for me either
You say this sort of thing a lot, in response to a wide range of criticisms of the show. I really don't understand your stance here. Why defend creative decisions you don't like or support? The whole point of criticism is, y'know, to
criticize such things. Otherwise it's akin to a sports fan saying "the center totally fouled on that play and the refs blew the call, but gosh, isn't this a fun game anyway?"
If I hear people complaining about other unscientific aspects of Trek like they do with DSC I will find that credible. However, that is not in my experience across multiple Trek boards and chats.
But they
have made those complaints, over the years, repeatedly. Several of the movies got absolutely shredded for it (and not just the Abrams ones—deservedly so—but also STV and ST:Gen in particular), as did vast swaths of VOY, and more selected instances in every other series, including TOS. Not sure how you could've missed all that.
This is something I vehemently disagree on. If the standards on any area for a new Star Trek series is the lowest point any previous series reached, then we really don't have standards. That something stupid happened in previous iterations is not a reason to repeat it. Indeed, one would hope that the past mistakes would be something one could learn from.
Exactly! This!
To the extent that that's accurate, it's because of fans like those in this thread being okay with it. To the extent that that's not accurate, it's because still other fans in this thread are not okay with it. Trek at least tries to be more Sci-Fi than Fantasy, and like anything, can ebb and flow closer to and further away from either.
And this!
I actually like trek because of the junk. It's all nonsense to me, but it's fun. Take it less seriously and you might get more enjoyment out of it!
This is why we can't have nice things.
I guess it comes down to the fact that Trek has some silly legacy issues. The question is: do we want Trek to double-down on the silliness and be an "anything goes" type of universe? Or do we want it to try to be serious even with the legacy background issues? I honestly don't know which one is the right answer.
I do. The second option. That's definitely the right answer.
