Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 3x13 - "That Hope Is You, Part 2"

[Vger23]

quite probably zero point something. As much a certain part of the fan base would like to believe otherwise, opinions don’t change very often for most people.

That's not my own personal experience.

For example...I couldn't make it through more than 8 episodes of ENT. I didn't hate it. I didn't bitch and moan about it. I just didn't like it much. I found it "blah," more of the same, and not for me. No harm done...I just bowed out. I then watched it on Netflix in the spring / summer of 2019, and I found I really appreciated it. The time that had past, allowing me for some franchise separation as well as having developed some different tastes and context, completely changed my viewpoint on what I thought of it.

Similarly, I really loved TUC when it premiered in 1991. Now, I can barely make it through the end of the 2nd act without completely losing interest. I used to think TMP was the weakest TOS movie. Now I think it is one of the strongest.

I think people change, perspectives change, and context is altered as time goes on. I think there are some people (not all....but some) who are very capable of changing their opinions on a movie or series based on any number of factors. I agree it's not common....but it is very possible.

I had to force myself through some TOS S3, DS9 S1-2, ENT S1-2, and TAS episodes...

I've had to force myself through episodes of every season in each series. Even my absolute favorite seasons of my favorite series have stinkers. Back when it was 26-30 episodes per season...the liklihood was far higher.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

Well, hope springth eternal in fandom I guess. But, I sincerely believe people are setting up to be disappointed. The biggest complaint I hear is around Michael Burnham and she isn't going anywhere so I don't see a positive path for those who don't like her.

As someone who is now famous for giving DIS the odd 1/10 the thing people need to remember when reading those bad reviews is for me a Trek 1/10 is still about 5 or 6 points higher than I would give 90% of the crap on TV.
My moaning about DIS is when holding it up against its own best episodes or other Trek/quality Sci-fi but God if I was on a forum for most of the other shows Netflix and the like are putting out it would be 10/10
So complaining does not automatically mean you absolutely hate watching it

 

[fireproof78]

As someone who is now famous for giving DIS the odd 1/10 the thing people need to remember when reading those bad reviews is for me a Trek 1/10 is still about 5 or 6 points higher than I would give 90% of the crap on TV.
My moaning about DIS is when holding it up against its own best episodes or other Trek/quality Sci-fi but God if I was on a forum for most of the other shows Netflix and the like are putting out it would be 10/10
So complaining does not automatically mean you absolutely hate watching it

What does it mean then?

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

What does it mean then?

Some people just enjoy complaining about stuff.
I find laughing about the giant Disco belly or the crying more fun than an hour long conversation about how great Tilly was today.
Same with all Trek tbh I talk about sex candle ghosts and salamanders way more than how much I loved Geordie

 

[fireproof78]

Some people just enjoy complaining about stuff.
I find laughing about the giant Disco belly or the crying more fun than an hour long conversation about how great Tilly was today.
Same with all Trek tbh I talk about sex candle ghosts and salamanders way more than how much I loved Geordie

I'll bear that in mind.

Though it confirms, in part, my suspicion that complaining is preferred in the viewing process.

 

[Lord Garth]

agreed: I don’t think many people that don’t like the show now will like it in 15 years.

This is basically the way I see things happening, using DS9, VOY, ENT, and the Kelvin Films as my guide. Basically anything that's not TOS or TNG:

1. When DSC is over, all the "Haters" -- the real "Haters" not people who are just critical of the show -- will forget about Disco and move on to whatever Trek series replaces it or is already in-progress.

2. Once they've moved on to the next Worst Thing Ever, DSC will be out-of-sight, out-of-mind to them.

3. Then we'll have a three-way fork in the road. 10 or 20 years from now, those former "Haters" will either think: 1) "This series wasn't as bad as I remembered", 2) "I still don't like it but at least it's better than the crap we have now!", or 3) "I still hate STD! This is the point where Star Trek hit the Point Of No Return!"

For the people who aren't and never were "Haters" and are just critical, ultimately, there will be some things they like about DSC, but it's not going to suddenly become their favorite.

One weird thing, though: It's not Discovery, but I've seen some people here who've suddenly said DS9 is their favorite Trek series who I could've sworn weren't Niners before. I don't know if it's because they suddenly discovered DS9 in the Streaming Era or if this was just TrekBBS's influence on these posters who finally decided, "I might as well see what the big deal is about!" Probably both. DS9 wasn't native to the Streaming Era, while DSC is.

The only way for Discovery (and Picard) to be discovered (at least in the US) is for them to get outside from behind the CBSAA/Paramount+ pay wall. And yet that's how these series even exist at all. It's a paradox.

 

[Vger23]

Some people just enjoy complaining about stuff.
I find laughing about the giant Disco belly or the crying more fun than an hour long conversation about how great Tilly was today.
Same with all Trek tbh I talk about sex candle ghosts and salamanders way more than how much I loved Geordie

That's an interesting perspective. It's almost like an "introvert vs. extrovert" comparison in terms of what makes people tick.

I am the exact opposite. I have absolutely zero interest (EDIT: well....not "absolutely zero interest"...but definitely not a lot lol) in talking about things in episodes or movies that annoy me. I have a hard time getting through VOY and ENT (although ENT's stock has improved since I watched a couple of years ago)...and you'll see virtually no posts by me in those forums. To me, there's absolutely no joy in rubbing crap in people's faces who enjoy things that annoy me. It feels like looking for a fight, and it just compounds negativity and galvanizes me on something I'd rather just let slide.

I am entertained by things that...well....entertain me. So I'll gravitate toward discussing characters / events / plots etc. that I like. I generally ignore things I don't like so they don't interfere with my overall enjoyment. If those things overwhelm me/become too hard to ignore, THEN I just cut the cord and decide that episode / movie / show isn't for me.

 

[Vger23]

This is basically the way I see things happening, using DS9, VOY, ENT, and the Kelvin Films as my guide. Basically anything that's not TOS or TNG:

1. When DSC is over, all the "Haters" -- the real "Haters" not people who are just critical of the show -- will forget about Disco and move on to whatever Trek series replaces it or is already in-progress.

2. Once they've moved on to the next Worst Thing Ever, DSC will be out-of-sight, out-of-mind to them.

3. Then we'll have a three-way fork in the road. 10 or 20 years from now, those former "Haters" will either think: 1) "This series wasn't as bad as I remembered", 2) "I still don't like it but at least it's better than the crap we have now!", or 3) "I still hate STD! This is the point where Star Trek hit the Point Of No Return!"

For the people who aren't and never were "Haters" and are just critical, ultimately, there will be some things they like about DSC, but it's not going to suddenly become their favorite.

One weird thing, though: It's not Discovery, but I've seen some people here who've suddenly said DS9 is their favorite Trek series who I could've sworn weren't Niners before. I don't know if it's because they suddenly discovered DS9 in the Streaming Era or if this was just TrekBBS's influence on these posters who finally decided, "I might as well see what the big deal is about!" Probably both. DS9 wasn't native to the Streaming Era, while DSC is.

The only way for Discovery (and Picard) to be discovered (at least in the US) is for them to get outside from behind the CBSAA/Paramount+ pay wall. And yet that's how these series even exist at all. It's a paradox.

I think staking out positions and fighting on message boards galvanizes people into a more set way of thinking. Those memories of past battle scars take away from people's natural ability to change with time.

Which is one of the main reasons I avoid talking extensively about things that annoy me. I don't want to get into a protracted fight that will just harden me and not allow me to be open minded about it in the future.

 

[TimeIsAPredator]

That's an interesting perspective. It's almost like an "introvert vs. extrovert" comparison in terms of what makes people tick.

I am the exact opposite. I have absolutely zero interest (EDIT: well....not "absolutely zero interest"...but definitely not a lot lol) in talking about things in episodes or movies that annoy me. I have a hard time getting through VOY and ENT (although ENT's stock has improved since I watched a couple of years ago)...and you'll see virtually no posts by me in those forums. To me, there's absolutely no joy in rubbing crap in people's faces who enjoy things that annoy me. It feels like looking for a fight, and it just compounds negativity and galvanizes me on something I'd rather just let slide.

I am entertained by things that...well....entertain me. So I'll gravitate toward discussing characters / events / plots etc. that I like. I generally ignore things I don't like so they don't interfere with my overall enjoyment. If those things overwhelm me/become too hard to ignore, THEN I just cut the cord and decide that episode / movie / show isn't for me.

I wonder if the fact that my humour is quite self deprecating have anything to do with it.
I don't take offense easily and I definitely don't get overly upset about things like TV. For instance I also love sport but unlike some of my friends it doesn't ruin my whole week if my team lose.

On the whole forum thing I get what you mean about VOY and ENT and I don't visit them often and would probably not visit DIS much if it was old but I can't stay away from any of the current shows threads

 

[Vger23]

I wonder if the fact that my humour is quite self deprecating have anything to do with it.
I don't take offense easily and I definitely don't get overly upset about things like TV. For instance I also love sport but unlike some of my friends it doesn't ruin my whole week if my team lose.

On the whole forum thing I get what you mean about VOY and ENT and I don't visit them often and would probably not visit DIS much if it was old but I can't stay away from any of the current shows threads

Makes a lot of sense to me....! And yes, the "new" stuff would be far more interesting to engage on, for sure.

 

[Discofan]

Makes a lot of sense to me....! And yes, the "new" stuff would be far more interesting to engage on, for sure.

Yes, especially when some of the old stuff didn't age that well.

 

[Lord Garth]

When I first posted on TrekBBS, I stayed out of the current series' forums. I stuck to TOS, GTD, and Future of Trek. Star Trek in general, where I thought it could go post-Berman, and it was great to talk about my favorite Trek show in a time when there weren't many places focused on it (in fact, I still think there aren't many Trek communities where TOS is the main focus).

I briefly posted in the ENT Forum leading up to and during the six episodes I watched, then I left. Someone somewhere said, "Don't go! You're the voice of reason!" And I thought, "See ya!"

 

[Gilora]

Yes, "only" collaborated with a secret cabal within the Federation to frame an innocent person. Other than that, pure as the driven snow (except all the other missions he's almost sure to have carried out with Section 31).

I keep thinking of the time when Admiral Ross and the Romulan Senator tried to talk Colonel Kira down from her blockade around one of Bajor's moons after the Romulans requested it for medical purposes then secretly used it for a weapons depot. He only back down when He figured out that Kira wasn't going to.

Kira utters one of my favorites from her: "Oh, your concern is touching, Senator. But I'm not dead yet. End transmission." It was all in the attitude.

 

[eschaton]

Personally, I feel like DIS is a mix of aspects I enjoy and frustrate the hell out of me. I complain at times, but that's because it's so close to being a great show (at least in my opinion) and the aspects it seems to miss the mark on are pretty self-evident things.

In contrast, something like ENT (or even VOY) was just all-around mediocre. Some episodes were better than others, but there was seldom anything (either individual episodes, or individual portions of episodes) I would call awesome. Even attempting detailed analysis of a lot of the episodes is hard because...they're boring.

Discovery is that friend of yours which is always fun to be around, but kinda a mess, while latter-day Berman Trek is that coworker who you can count on to give you the exact amount of work required to finish an assignment, and nothing more.

 

[fireproof78]

I wonder if the fact that my humour is quite self deprecating have anything to do with it.
I don't take offense easily and I definitely don't get overly upset about things like TV. For instance I also love sport but unlike some of my friends it doesn't ruin my whole week if my team lose.

On the whole forum thing I get what you mean about VOY and ENT and I don't visit them often and would probably not visit DIS much if it was old but I can't stay away from any of the current shows threads

I have a similar thought process. I lack the intense emotion over a TV show, and if a show is bad it doesn't ruin, well anything. Like if my favorite sports team loses it's disappointing and then life goes on.

I probably come across as more easily offended than I mean. Largely because I genuinely have questions as to why people will keep watching something that is largely being posted about as being terrible. Your post at preferring to post about complaints rather than positive is helpful to me because, like @Vger23 I feel little reason to dwell on the negative.

I'm trying, perhaps failing to succeed, at gathering that the complaints are a sign of just wanting Discovery to do better. That it isn't from a place of Discovery not fitting in to the round hole of preconceived notions of Star Trek but just wanting it to do well. But, I guess it just bears reminding that people actually enjoy facets of the show rather than just here to complain.

That might just be me though.

 

[Deledrius]

I really liked this finale, and I loved this season. Not perfect, but leaps and bounds over the first two. I hope we continue in this direction. It finally felt like I was watching Star Trek again. I enjoy seeing competent people overcome external and internal conflicts with optimism and hope for a better tomorrow, and I got that in every episode this season.

Were the workings of turbolifts in the 'old' series really that much more believable? That you could enter a turbolift from any point in the ship and just say 'bridge' and it would take you to the bridge? We know DSC is a huge ship: is it that hard to imagine that there's an open space where the turbolifts take their correct position?

Yes, it's far more believable that a lift which can function vertically and horizontally but is otherwise ordinary can exist, because they already do. They are slow and not in wide use but they do exist in our present day, so it is very easy to extrapolate through the improved material science of Star Trek and their ability to manipulate gravity that a more impressive version of a modern technology would be in use on the ships. On the other hand, it is very difficult to believe that an open, hollow space that appears the size of a city exists inside of a ship we can see is not that large. We have a very good indication on the show through the shuttlebay, quite frequently in fact, just how (not especially) large the star drive section of the ship is. A good chunk of it is taken up by that very shuttlebay. The space we're shown in this episode appears larger than the ship's internal area, so it's asking me to believe that Starfleet of the 23rd century had TARDIS technology. That is neither something I'm ready to believe, nor is it something that the show has demonstrated (outside of this scene) that it wants me to believe. That makes this yet another "spectacle over sense" error, but one that is hard to ignore because instead of being an incidental illustration it was an action set piece that the movement of the character through the scene depended on.

You can get away with an endless chase scene on elevated platforms in Into Darkness through an actual city, and I won't question it. You try to do that in the interior space of a starship, while showing me the thing is irrationally hollow, and I have a much harder time accepting that, mostly because if I do a lot of other, ordinary things stop making sense. At this point they may just be trolling us.

I enjoyed it. The innerspace of the ship is so dumb but I don't really care. I was a bit disappointed Osyraa died. She was a pretty good villain when she was being pragmatic and not a cartoon character.

Agreed. She started as a cartoon villain, then suddenly turned into a more nuanced one, and then turned right back into a cartoon. She had potential, but it was all smashed up here at the end of the season. I think they could have done with the extra room of fifteen episodes this year. Alas.

Stamets, however, is getting super tedious. Burnham and Vance were right. I find it so annoying that he's bitter about having to sacrifice. As opposed to most of the crew, he got to keep his family with him when coming to the future. He gained a bigger family there. Now he's mad at his commander that he almost lost them? I understand during the heat of it, but afterward? What an asshole. I guess that fits with his base character, though.

Yeah, that's a really good observation about his position of even having something to lose where no one else does. Stamets is a guy who doesn't exactly keep his displeasure to himself, though, so it's consistent. And given all he's been through with Hugh, I can sympathize with his resentment. There's a reason families serving together can cause issues, just ask Picard. Burnham may need to make a hard call again next season that splits them up; that's part of being the Captain.

Yeah, but they need a new foe... unless they plan to deserialize the series and make it more like TOS for example...with self-contained episodes.

I don't think we need a foe every season any more than the show needs a new captain every season. Remember Star Trek IV? It did pretty well without one. In fact, this season of Discovery would have worked just as well without a direct adversary from the Emerald Chain. Her contribution was largely superficial. This season did a wonderful job of positioning Vance himself as an antagonist at times. The benefit of writing your characters to be complex people is they can all be good guys and still disagree and be in conflict in various ways as their priorities fail to align. Even better, when writing them as complex, good people, you have a lot more avenues to resolve the conflict than just "I shot her" as they did here.

What was with the TOS music at the end? This is Discovery. None of the other shows used that music.
If anything they should have used Archer’s theme as that was about building the Federation

Yeah, that bothered me too. It's one of those things that just screams "remember this other show!" in an attempt to make me feel the things about this show that I do about the show it's borrowing from. It made sense to use it last season when visiting Talos, but here it just came out of nowhere (the ending quote is not sufficient to justify it, IMO).

 

[Jadeb]

I'm trying, perhaps failing to succeed, at gathering that the complaints are a sign of just wanting Discovery to do better. That it isn't from a place of Discovery not fitting in to the round hole of preconceived notions of Star Trek but just wanting it to do well. But, I guess it just bears reminding that people actually enjoy facets of the show rather than just here to complain.

People also engage with criticism differently. I love, love, love TOS. I think it's one of the greatest TV shows ever produced. But it can also be goofy and heavy-handed and badly acted at times, and I don't mind if people say so. I enjoy those discussions, even. I like talking about the good parts, and I like talking about the bad parts. And if someone decides it's dated, unwatchable junk, their dislike doesn't affect me one whit. Who cares?

Personally, I feel no defensiveness for the Trek franchise, and I wouldn't have any interest in this place if it were just a bunch of peple agreeing how great the show is.

 

[fireproof78]

People also engage with criticism differently. I love, love, love TOS. I think it's one of the greatest TV shows ever produced. But it can also be goofy and heavy-handed and badly acted at times, and I don't mind if people say so. I enjoy those discussions, even. I like talking about the good parts, and I like talking about the bad parts. And if someone decides it's dated, unwatchable junk, their dislike doesn't affect me one whit. Who cares?

Personally, I feel no defensiveness for the Trek franchise, and I wouldn't have any interest in this place if it were just a bunch of peple agreeing how great the show is.

Again, I don't know mind discussion but if it is the same complaint again and again then it makes me raise my Vulcan eyebrow as to why to keep engaging. I guess it might come across as defensive but it's more just confusion.

And, yeah, I love TOS, warts and all. My wife can't get past how dated it is. And that's fine. I don't want people agreeing all the time either. Just, a balance, I guess. I don't know. It seems that negativity is just preferred when it comes to discussing episodes or highlighting the enjoyable parts. At least it seems to me.

 

[cooleddie74]

"The Alternative Factor(TOS)" is at times one of the most inexplicable and poorly-explained stories in the history of the franchise and that's saying something. Yet how can one completely dislike any episode of a Trek series that contains this music and dialogue?

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[fireproof78]

The Alternative Factor(TOS)" is at times one of the most inexplicable and poorly-explained stories in the history of the franchise and that's saying something. Yet how can one completely dislike any episode of a Trek series that contains this music and dialogue?

This is what I get for growing up without the Internet. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to like this episode until today