Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 3x07 - "Unification III"

It's still stupid. They should have introduced a lower deck character who can act like Edington did on DS9.

 

There's always exceptions to the rule of course. But while Jean-Luc Picard's speech Measure of a Man was okay. His overly self-serving speech about the rights of the Borg now named Hugh, superseded the opportunity to destroy an enemy that assimilated entire civilizations was cringe-worthy as written and ranged really hollow when he delivered it.

 

TBH I don't remember the contents of most of his speaches. Didn't really care about his character when I watched as a child first time round and I'm only noticing him now rewatching as an adult

 

Or...prerhaps it was just a random combination of letters and numbers the writers assigned.

Crazy...I know! But it is possible.

 

This is a tough one to rate.

No need to rehash the Tilly stuff. I already said why I don't agree with it. I already said I'm not going to defend it, and I'm not going to make myself out to be a liar. So moving on...

Gabrielle Burnham. I have no problem with her being in The Future. My rationale is that when she was sucked back through the vortex/wormhole/whatever, she ended up on Terralysium in this future. Or at least some sort of Class M planet, if not Terralysium. I can suspend my disbelief there. But then there's her being a Qowat Milat...

I can see how they drew a roadmap to get her there. This is how I reverse-engineered the way they got there:

The root of Burnham's character is that she had foster parents on Vulcan. A connection to Vulcan. An episode titled "Unification III" is going to want to keep Burnham's connection to Vulcan and reinforce it in the show's new time period. So if her foster parents were from Vulcan, why can't they take a page from that and have her actual parent living on Vulcan? That's probably what the writers were thinking. But Burnham's moved away from acting like a Vulcan and her mother probably wouldn't act like a Vulcan. If Vulcans and Romulans are reunified -- but Romulus is destroyed -- why not have the Romulans live on Vulcan as one people again? So Gabrielle Burnham can take after the Romulans. And what better way to do it than have her be part of the Qowat Milat?

... the problem is they 100% molded Gabrielle to fit the particular story they wanted to tell here. It was the character bending to the will of the story instead of the story building off the character as was.

I appreciate them going for a twist, but we know so little about Gabrielle and it was such an unconventional choice that it would've been nice if she explained in some depth what made her join the Qowat Milat of all things.

On the other hand, Gabrielle brings up a good point. Why should Ni'Var (sp?) listen to Starfleet when even Burnham -- their representative -- hasn't listened? So I appreciate seeing them have to argue that out.

I also appreciate the ritualized debate. It's like they combined "Amok Time" with the Debate Society. It's not exactly too often you see that.

And, yes, I appreciated seeing the holo-recording of Spock from the original "Unification" two-parter. I like to think that if Leonard Nimoy had lived, they would've found some way to include him in Discovery or Picard, through a flashback of some sort.

This brings me to the Vulcan/Romulan reunification. I'm glad to see it happened. Yes, it's fictional. I'm glad anyway. That alone makes the episode title "Unification III" justified. But I also like that they renamed the planet to Ni'Var. It shows that the Vulcans and Romulans united and not that the Romulans were just assimilated back into Vulcan like keeping the name Vulcan would've implied.

The flaws in this episode didn't detract from my enjoyment but I can't pretend they're not there. "I kind of liked it and it killed some time" doesn't sound right. Which is what I'd give a 6. "This was a solid episode, but nothing pushed it passed that", which is what I'd give a 7, doesn't sound right either. The Spock holo pushes it passed that, but making the characters so subservient to the plot whether it made sense or not doesn't exactly make it 100% rock solid...

I voted 7 in the poll (because round numbers are the only option), but I really give this episode a 6.5. This is the high-end of the mixed range. Sorry.

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One other thing: finally a bed scene with Burnham & Book. It's about fucking time! We need an emoticon with someone smoking a cigarette... because none of the ones on this board do it justice.

This is the closest one -->

 

If nothing else, Burnham is following the grand Trek tradition of speechifying

 

I thought this was pretty good. I liked it better than last week, but not by a lot. I thought the insights into the Vulcan/Romulan reunification were very well done, and I liked the trial scenes very much. It was a little slow for my taste, as I am one who likes my DSC to be a little more dynamic. This kind of felt like a standard, talky TNG episode...but one of the better ones

All the obvious pros and cons have been covered:

Spock holo - yay!
Mama Burnham - interesting, but yay?
Tilly - whatever, I don’t give a fuck I suppose even though this was a painful decision the writers should have known everyone would shit on
Admiral guy - I like him
Burnham - not leaving anytime soon yay

Is the Detmer plot all done?

 

I'm not making any particular claim, just that I would not be surprised. ("would not put it past" does have a particular meaning, no?)

 

I doubt it. I think they're just taking a break from it.

 

I disagree. Everyone uses stardates. Only the people of Earth use our calendar which when you stop to think about it, only makes sense on Earth, after all, it's based on Earth's orbit around the sun and Earth's rotation around its own axis. It makes no sense on any other planet.

 

What if it refers to a descendant of Michael Burham? Like Sybok Burham the 19th (of that name)... (that was named in honor of Michael's big brother who died killed by "god" or whatever that was)

 

But that's almost certainly not the case if you go back 1,000 years.

Indeed, mathematically speaking, everyone of European ancestry shares a common ancestor 1,000 years back. This doesn't mean necessarily that you share genetic ancestry with everyone, because due to how recombination works ancestors you have more than eight generations ago may share zero DNA with you. But it does mean you share genealogical ancestors.

So, we should conclude that a very large percentage of future humanity - potentially even the majority - have an alien ancestor somewhere back in the family tree, although they may have zero alien DNA. A large minority might have like 1% ancestry or something analogous - detectable on a DNA test, but probably not in terms of phenotype. And a smaller minority should be mixed - particularly on offworld settlements where they have long lived alongside aliens.

 

My mother's family has been America since the 1600s.. There are no doubt people today who's ethnic background has remained unchanged for millennia either through isolation or choice. The more cosmopolitan planets are more likely to have people of mixed backgrounds than a remote colony world settled by a single species.

 

i really don’t see the problem: we really didn’t know much about her apart from her being michael’s mother and messing with time travel, so it’s not as if they changed the character to bring her there. Perhaps she always felt a calling to become a nun. Perhaps the idea of complete candor alluded her. Perhaps it just seemed the most logical way to integrate in a future with no stable points of reference.

 

So not much further back.

I guess that the sentilese...

 

File this under "Technically possible but highly, highly unlikely." If she had a calling to become a nun, she'd have been more inclined to raise Burnham on religion. In "New Eden", when Pike asks Burnham and Owosekun if they've been in a church, Burnham gives a very wishy-washy answer. I'm thinking if Gabrielle were religious enough that she'd have thoughts about becoming a nun, she would've had Michael go to church. From the looks of "New Eden", Pike was the only one of those three who was raised on religion.

That sounds more like it. If "Perpetual Infinity" is anything to go by. I'd go with this one.

 

agreed. It’s way to much. Very episode now. Burnham sounds like she imitating Christian bales Batman or she and other crew members are getting emotional and crying. I need to take a tally of how many episodes had crying and how many not. Lol

 

perhaps she felt the calling but hated religion! As you said, technically anything is possible, the character is almost completely new.

 

Although they're called nuns, do we really know the Qowat Milat have any supernatural beliefs?

 

In terms of Europeans in North America, that's about as far back as you can get.

No idea what you're saying here.

Point is, for there to be mixing there has to be opportunity. The more isolated or insular the community, the less likely there is for inter-species off spring.