• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x09 - "Rubicon"

Rate the episode...


  • Total voters
    102
I thought that was Star Wars.
2100s:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

2100s:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

2200s:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

2300s:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

2400s:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

Far Future, Star Trek Voyager:

FTL travel in ships. Ray guns. Transporters. Torpedoes. In the Navy workin' for the government.

Oh, in Voyager the FTL ships travel in time, too, so the interstellar government can practice its Prime Directive throughout history with its transporters and ray guns and torpedoes.
 
BEHOLD...

wHv9Y7c.png
The natural progression for her arc.
Villain - hero - commander - captain - leader of Federation Senate - god.
 
Normally, I am against established characters going Fury, but I would make an exception for Michael Burnham. More than that, though, I just want her to actually get it wrong sometime, if you know what I mean.

Sometimes I wonder if the problem is that the Disco producers refuse to choose a lane between two contradictory paths.

They want Burnham to be a heroic lead who ALWAYS saves the day, in the mold of so many Trek captains before her.

But those Trek captains did not have to exist within the structure of a Streaming Serialized Drama, which generally require the lead to constantly make mistakes and fall into ever-more-hopeless situations, from which they must then extricate themselves.

It was easier to write heroic lead material for Kirk, Picard, and Janeway, because those characters were mostly placed in dilemma's that had a clear "right" answer. They got to fly in, find that answer, implement it, and continue on. (I have no unified theory of what the fuck Archer was doing those 4 seasons)

It's much harder to showcase Burnham as a similarly infallible hero, when her stories have to stretch over 13 episodes, and the drama must be personal, so at least some of the obstacles have to come from her own life, but not in a way that makes it illogical for her to continue to be the center, so it can never really be her fault, even though she must be somehow fueling it, and the stakes are always "all life in the universe", which distorts how everything is judged, and so on. Writing wise, it is a challenging (impossible?) proposition.

Sisko is an interesting counterpoint, in that he also existed on a serialized show -- but he was frequently placed in morally ambiguous situations without clear "right" answers. And DS9 allowed us to sometimes consider Sisko's actions as wrong -- or, at the very least, not obviously right. He lived far more in the gray than any of his counterparts.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Burnham's most successful character arc was season one, in which she was allowed to catastrophically fuck up in a way that was seen and acknowledged by the entire Alpha Quadrant.

Sometimes I wish Disco had just been given the episodic-with-emotional-serialization structure. The Disco characters have always been so fresh and new and a great strength of the series, and the existing show structure has often failed and compromised them. Just get out of their way! Simplify the setup and let these actors/characters shine!
 
Last edited:
From earlier in the thread I was thinking how 1,000 years later they’re using pretty much the same two types of torpedoes. We’re not using the same weapons we were using 1,000 years ago. I’m torn between lazy writing or why not create a new type of torpedo or maybe they shouldn’t have gone so far into the future for so little changes. The lack of development would’ve been a little more plausible if it was the 26th or 27th century
 
From earlier in the thread I was thinking how 1,000 years later they’re using pretty much the same two types of torpedoes. We’re not using the same weapons we were using 1,000 years ago. I’m torn between lazy writing or why not create a new type of torpedo or maybe they shouldn’t have gone so far into the future for so little changes. The lack of development would’ve been a little more plausible if it was the 26th or 27th century

More like mid-25th century (and even THAT is somewhat stretching it).
I could see Quantum Torpedoes (upgraded of course) still being in use in the 25th century as a 'standard' replacement for Photons... with another set of torpedoes after that... maybe Transphasic?

What Disco sowcased doesn't really go beyond 50 odd years of what would 'realistically' happen after late 24th century (programmable matter included)... that is this would have been the case if someone with actual brains decided to write Disco.

They pushed the show too far into the future if you ask me.
 
In the Voyager finale, didn't the time shenanigans mean that Voyager brought home the armor tech and "Transphasic Torpedoes" that were better than Quantum Torpedoes from the alternate 25th century?
 
They did. Which means the technology was later abandoned or was classified as being too powerful for regular use by Starfleet ships and never saw widespread deployment.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top