It was good old arrogant Starfleet everyone loves our help BS and the butterflies were right to tell em to F off
Except the Butterflies did not tell them to fuck off. They
opened fire on them for no reason. Had they simply said, "We don't trust you and don't want you on our planet. Leave now," they would have gotten what they wanted. Trying to kill Michael and Book was absolutely not reasonable.
I really would like if where they were going was to end with a mutual respect and having both grown. But the usual from Discovery would be for events to completely prove Burnham right and the president to make a groveling apology or turn out to be eeeeeevil.
I mean, the series literally starts with Michael realizing she's made a horrible mistake that started a war and cost her substitute mother-figure her life. And last season, we saw Vance start as a foil and end as someone they were learning from,
without him making any sort of groveling apology and with Michael learning from him. So I don't think this is an accurate assertion at all.
Would be nice though if the president was right and Burnham learns a hard lesson by getting people killed.
I strongly suspect this is coming.
I'm a bit worried about Adira. I really liked her last season and I'm glad they're trying to give her more character traits than just "science prodigy" and "non-binary." But I hope they aren't trying to make her the new Tilly, now that the latter grows more self-assured. If it was just a one-time thing of nervousness in a new position, that's fine. I mean, ofc she can be nervous at times... just don't make her NewTilly.
I'm sure you didn't mean to misgender them, but Adira is not a
she, Adira is a
they. Not saying that to be judgey -- letting go of the gender binary is hard when it's what you've been raised with! It's easy to automatically assign a non-binary person to a binary gender identity without realizing that that's what you've done. I've done that myself.
Anyway, I think Adira's arc has always been more than just "science prodigy" and "non-binary." Their arc was all about grief and how to move on from it. And I also think that it's extremely reductive and premature to take
one scene about being nervous before a big career event and make that into "they're becoming the next Tilly."
And her bf really needs a body/ life of his own!
He agrees!
if Harry Kim ever wanted a promotion boy did he pick he wrong show. Tilly from Cadet to LT in two seasons.
I mean, it's basically the same progress as Nog on DS9. Nog had two seasons as a cadet (DS9 S4-5), two seasons as an ensign (DS9 S6-7), and then got promoted to lieutenant at the end of DS9 S7.
Tilly spent one season onscreen as a cadet (DIS S1), two seasons as an ensign (DIS S2-3), and now is a lieutenant. Presumably she had multiple years as a cadet before DIS S1, probably more years as a cadet than Nog.
I mostly agree with the President about Burnham. I’m curious if they ditched the Kelvin-verse thing of Spock creating the Kobayashi Maru. Feels like they did.
Did Spock actually create the Kobayashi Maru test in ST09? Obviously he administered it, but was there any line establishing that he was the creator of the test concept?
First time I’ve heard it since last season but man, the title song really leaves you wanting after hearing the ones for LD and Prodigy.
It took me a little bit to get attached to it, but I've come to love the DIS theme song. The LD theme feels really generic to me.
PRO's theme is obviously amazing, what with it being Michael Giacchino.
I mean, the President's basic message to Michael was "being a leader is about more than being a hero - sometimes you have to let someone else be the hero, and sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit you can't do everything." And - with the notable exception of Kirk - that's how all the Trek captains have behaved.
I think that's true of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. I don't really think that's how Archer behaved. Frankly, Archer strikes me as too immature to even have a command philosophy.
Amusingly, I think that philosophy is definitely behind a lot of Captain Freeman's choices, but Starfleet makes her eat shit for it a lot. Guess that's what happens when your ship is
California-class, even if it's not fair.
And I do think that TWOK was all about Kirk having to come to terms with this fact after avoiding it for all of TOS and TMP. I think the Kirk of the later films was a bit older and wiser that way.
The set up couldn't possibly be more obvious, IMO.
The President calls Burnham out as an inexperienced Captain who hasn't made the tough choices and hasn't faced that people under her command might die. Which basically tells me both those things will happen. It's in big, green neon lights.
Yep. Michael's arc this season is probably going to be a more detailed, better-developed version of Kirk's arc in TWOK.
Plus we're in what I assume is now the middle of the series. This is the right time to have a shift in her character. They're channeling the Kelvin Films this season, down to having Book's planet destroyed. And Burnham is essentially being written like she's NuKirk, not Kirk Kirk but NuKirk. The Kelvin influence is there right from the first scene.
On this, I think the Kelvin influence is overstated. Michael, even with her levels of inexperience, is more mature and thoughtful than Kelvin-Kirk; Kelvin-Kirk was written and acted much more broadly. Frankly, Michael's actions as captain so far strike me as being far more comparable to Kirk Prime during the TOS era.
- Felt like S1 of Discovery, where they namedrop Archer and have other Star Trek references (“what we left behind”) for the sake of it. There’s no actually meaning behind these references at all. If the current Federation President said she models herself after Archer’s time as the Federation President as he’s her favourite, that would be meaningful and would develop both the current Federation President to explain her behaviour and Archer himself.
I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that that's what the writers did by having the President name the new spacedock after Archer. Not everything has to be spelled out.
- No one seems to have learned what’s happened in the past 900 years.
This is false. We literally saw Michael looking up Spock's history in "Unification III," and we saw the entire crew learning about the history of the past couple hundred years throughout S3, including solving a huge mystery about the past that no one else had solved.
Do we see them reading the Space Wikipedia articles about everything that's happened from 2258 to 3188? No, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen off-screen. The show isn't
about that, so the writers are not going to waste time showing them doing a thing the audience can already reasonably infer the characters were doing.
Its not like Spock was best friends with someone that beat the Kobayashi Maru, and that would have been a useful retort for Burnham, even if the Federation President countered that the number of those who beat the Kobayashi Maru could be counted on one hand and Burnham isn’t one of them.
I'm sorry, but that would not have been good writing. That would have been pedantic ST trivia-wank. Kirk did not actually "beat" the Kobayashi Maru, because he cheated and reprogrammed it. The President was correct in asserting that nobody has ever beaten the test, and the writers made a good decision in not invoking Kirk in dialogue.
Or Janeway’s CMO used a mobile emitter, one option that would be at least worth considering for Gray. Not to mention Picard’s gollum.
Two biological consciousnesses sharing a brain with one of them needing to be extracted without harming the other is a very, very different thing from a computer program on a holo-projector or a single consciousness being removed from a dying brain.
This just sounds like more trivia-wank to me. I wouldn't
object to it being there in a short, light scene of exposition, but its absence doesn't harm the show either.
- Destruction of Kwejian – was this really necessary? I feel like planets in sci-fi are destroyed now for the sake of destroying one, and its losing all meaning. It was alright in ST’09 and even in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, but now its feeling tired and it shouldn’t feel that way.
I think it works in this context -- the Federation has clearly not faced a planet-killer in centuries, and no one knows what caused this. I also think ST has done planet-killers pretty often in its history -- the Doomsday Machine? the Crystalline Entity? -- without getting shit about it before.
Discovery dumped a political rivalry between the Federation and the Emerald Chain for this? And yet if this planet was say, Qonos, Cardassia or Bajor, its destruction would hold more meaning.
Why would it hold more meaning? None of the characters we see this season are Klingon. President Rallik has Cardassian and Bajoran heritage, but we don't know if she's attached to either planet. Book is the character we've spent the most time with between him and Rallik, and Kwejian was his home and a planet we've spent time on in this show.
- Turning Adira into the new Tilly is just a sign that whatever maturation and growth the crew experiences might be limited to a few characters.
Again:
one scene. This is an incredibly reductive way to describe
one scene of nervousness.
- I also liked that they showed Burnham rebuilding the Federation. Still think it would have made for a more interesting season long plot. These threats of the season plots are reminiscent of ENT S3,
Honestly if you look at the history of genre television, it seems pretty clear that the concept of having a single over-arching conflict and villain for each season goes back to Joss Whedon's work on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That practice influenced a huge number of subsequent shows, including Russell T. Davies and his successors on
Doctor Who, and probably the producers of ENT S3 yes. But it's become extremely common on a lot of genre TV shows.
and while I do considerate a favourite, I feel like they are missing as to why threat of the season worked for ENT and its not working for DIS.
We're one episode in. Don't you think it's a little premature to say S4's arc isn't working?
Oh, I agree. The butterflies did nothing wrong.
They opened negotiations in bad faith and then tried to murder two diplomatic envoys instead of just telling them to leave. That's pretty damn wrong.
But the heroes' attitudes in that scene were way off. It was like a buddy movie. Burnham especially should have known better. Out of anyone in the cast. Her character is the one who straddled the line between human and Vulcan, and would have a better idea as to how to behave around strangers. Come to think of it, Book is also just as qualified as her. Those two just blundered right in, smirking, and talked down to the butterflies.
They did not talk down to the Butterflies. Michael was extremely respectful of them, but the Butterflies decided to prioritize their feelings of hostility over reason. Had they given Michael a short amount of time to explain that Grudge the Cat is not actually an imprisoned head of state and that referring to her as a "queen" was a metaphor, they would have seen there was no reason for violence.
Then their grand plan was to make it easier for the butterflies to shoot at them?
Michael's improvised response to unwarranted hostility was to demonstrate good faith by refusing to fire back and by helping them repair technology they couldn't repair on their own, even if doing so meant sacrificing her own life.
I can see that. But "running cargo" post-Burn is probably just as dangerous as anything that Michael and crew had to do. The only difference is that the President would be in a slower ship, at the mercy of pirates.
That is a really good point!
Right? Was the whole point of the episode that Burnham just hasn't learned the lessons that she needs to? Or is it that she's above those lessons?
I think the point is that Burnham
is ready to be captain, but she's still a junior captain who needs to continue to gain experience as C.O. before she'll be ready for more responsibility.
Like, you don't promote someone to regional manager without having them be general manager first. Same principle.
We see the Klingons basically coming in for a fight, treating Georgiou's "We come in peace" as a lie. Burnham getting blamed was a scapegoat of the highest proportions, and set her down a path of basically not trusting anyone.
I mean, yes and no? She did still fire the first shot against the Torchbearer.
Or in TOS, or any other action/adventure franchise. Yeah, it's not just Kelvin here.
Yeah, captains who are main characters go off-ship for adventures all the time in lots of shows including ST.
ETA: Hell, just watch Marvel films. They are sarcastic, snarky and quippy all throughout death defying situations. I recently watched "Winter Soldier" and Captain America and Black Window are commenting throughout the action scenes. Calling it "Kelvin" seems rather short sighted at this point. However, I would agree to call it Marvel because Marvel does it all the time.
Honestly, I think it's a function of the fact that we the audience have just seen too many death-defying action sequences in too many productions. The writers are reacting to the need to keep the audience from getting bored, hence the semi-meta nature of these kinds of quips.
I agree that Burnham needs a foil. This season it's the President. But she really needs her own Bones and Spock to challenge her. Well, she had Spock until the time jump. Maybe her Spock could be Saru when he rejoins. And Stamets her Bones.
Think one of the issues is that everyone is so chummy chummy on the ship. They're even more "no conflict" than TNG now. There's no internal butting of worldviews and professional opinions anymore.
I think that's what Stamets did in the S3 finale, isn't it? He was furious that Michael was willing to prioritize the ship over Hugh, Adira, Saru, and Gray. "They're my family!" And he still seems pretty pissed at her in this episode.
Speaking of "some" people, can someone tell me why this Burnett person quoted upthread is noteworthy? (I vaguely remember what he did last year, I mean: Was he officially involved with Trek at some point or is he just a well-known "fan"?)
Well-known fan, podcast host, was involved in the Axanar thing, but most significantly he's produced, written, and directed a lot of DVD/Blu-Ray special content features over the years, and that's made him a minor character at the edge of Hollywood and given him clout in fandom.
His name is Book. And he's not going to be that foil anymore once he blames Burnham for the destruction of his planet (we all know this is coming)
?????
I disagree. She may not have actually cried but she overacted a lot in S3, basically making that face you make right before crying, but in a really exaggerated way.
When. Please tell me when, and please tell me what a better acting choice would have been.
And Mr. Burnett until his falling out with Alec Peters over money was right there with the rest of them claiming somehow that Paramount no longer held rights to the Star Trek IP and that they felt all the elements of their take were now in the Public Domain.
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