Why do many 3rd act of discovery, especially in season 2 always end with big cgi set pieces or some kind of action combat fights? one of the problems I agree with about many people that hate discovery and feels it is not intellectual enough compared to TNG or DS9, Star trek discovery at times plays like a generic superhero TV show. with the amount of cgi and fighting that goes on. I could not stop cringing when Burnham and Captain Philippa got into a fight with a lot of punches and kicks in season 2 episode 7? I think. it almost felt as if I was watching black widow in an mcu movie. CBS must be trying really hard to get the superhero crowd for star trek. After a lot of rewatching for season 2, I can say it is one of the poorest star trek seasons, too much cgi ,poor predictable generic done plot (Red Angel) It now does feel as If the guy who wrote transformers (Alex Kurtzman) is truly in charge of star trek because he is.
Season 2 had promise and became more generic scifi action-flickish the second half. Every age has its tropes. God knows my beloved TOS had its share of fistfights. Not my thing but de rigueur for 60s tv.
What does that have to do with anything? You said the third act in both the thread title and your post. That particular scene was in the fourth act.
Gotta be honest, I've never had a clue about what constitutes the 2nd, 3rd, 4th acts of anything. i know the first act and the last, that's it.
I'd rather watch 20 minutes of action than 20 minutes of characters reciting nonsense technobabble or moralising. TOS was fundamentally about three things: people, adventure and sex. TNG might have made trek more intellectual but it also sacrificed a lot of what made trek fun.
It's actually pretty easy to figure out with TV shows since when the show comes back from a commercial break marks the start of a new act.
It's not and will not be. It is much more like TOS which was billed as a "action/adventure" series with social commentary built in. Kirk certainly seemed very intellectual when Spock told him to kill Gary Mitchell. Or those times he had to reason with Spock by punching him. Really good intellectual debates there.
It has never felt like TOS to me, honestly. It has felt more like TNG, with the odd, odd action sequence tossed in because they had the money to spend. It felt like they didn't have faith in what they were writing. After reading "Dead Endless", and playing a bit of its Star Trek Online portion, I am convinced that there were really compelling science-fiction concepts at the heart of Discovery that were wasted in the endless fan service.
I should clarify that it is closer to TOS in terms of leaning on the action/adventure stylings rather than just TNG type exposition and technobabble. Now, to be clear, I don't want DSC to take more from one show or the other. As @Greg Cox has noted Star Trek is a variety platform that can encompass multiple story telling styles. So, Star Trek?
Yes. No. Maybe? On a streaming platform, they had the opportunity for the first time to do something meaningful beyond basic pop-culture TV, and they wasted it, falling back on what was comfortable and easy. It was disappointing on that level. I didn't expect Westworld, but I did expect more than the simple moralizing and fan service we got.
And they might get there. They might not. Comfort and ease is the name of the game. I didn't expect more just because streaming. Every Trek series has its growing pains, sadly, and DSC has been no different. I mean, I enjoy the show and the characters, but I can be honest about missteps too.
I'm hoping a single show runner for a season helps the show. Though Michelle Paradise's work on "Such Sweet Sorrow" has me a bit concerned. All we can do is wait and see. Hopefully her idea of adult drama is deeper than a fake Klingon boob and the word "fuck".
I believe that will help, though I think Michael had her deep moments in Season 1. It just wasn't always consistent.
This is what sci-fi action adventure shows are in this millennium, friend. Heck, Trek had jumped onboard that trend long before Discovery. The Kelvin movies and, before them, Enterprise leaned much more into action than anything else. VOY had moved towards a more action heavy show, as it went on, albeit less in your face than the shows and films that followed. DS9 was about a friggin’ war, for almost half it’s run. Yes, there was a lot of deep stuff in there, but when you see trailers for DS9’s run, it’s all big fleet battles, etc. Others have already described TOS’ action content in here. I’m afraid that the only Trek you are actually describing is TNG. And 7 seasons of that, does not a Trek norm make.
I was actually happy at how the second season was relatively light on action compared to the first season. We waited until the final episode to even have a true space battle for example. Yeah, there were several episodes which had smaller scale things like phaser fights/hand-to-hand combat, but the season was relatively creative with the "action" component, with several episodes (particularly in the earlier run of the season) focusing on "disaster" style spectacle instead. The weakness of the second season was much more focused on the serialized arc being extremely weak and showing evidence of a sudden mid-season correction. I expect that if anything the "action quotient" for Season 3 will be higher. Kurtzman has made it clear that Picard is going to be the more slow-paced, talky show which hits the spot a lot of fans were missing. He's also made it clear he doesn't want a lot of overlap between the shows. So Discovery will likely double down on what makes it Discovery-ish, which means more action and more melodrama.
One of the greatest myths of our times is that Star Trek was ever "intellectual." Slow, ponderous and preachy at times? Yes. Intellectual? Hardly ever. Stop it.
Historically speaking, there are basically four kinds of Trek episodes: Action-adventure, character focus, comedy, and "issue-based." This was evident as far back as TOS, and the Berman era solidified it. I absolutely think there are intellectual Trek episodes though. What would you call The Measure of a Man?
Faux intellectual? You simply couldn't settle the matter of Data in a 48 minute episode at a starbase.
I'd start with "boring and criminally overrated." I've NEVER understood the love for this episode. And I didn't really mean Star Trek couldn't be intellectual. It has been wonderfully so at various, rare times. I just meant that, on the whole, it is a myth that it is consistently intellectual.