Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x01 - "The Broken Circle"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
SPOCK: Ah! ...'The giants'.
Not too impressed. Fun, mindless romp is probably the best thing I can say. I am now convinced that this entire show is M'Benga, Spock, Uhura and Chapel role playing on the rec deck in their off time. Just a giant video game. They all decided to check out the new Captain Pike DLC.
Except this is what people talked like at the time:
More like a cross between a "pirate" accent, a Jamaican accent, and someone doing a really bad Russian accent.
Fair enough, but still sounds kind of British. Way moreso than most musicals or historical dramas produced in the past century.
Episode was good, except that I didn't enjoy the LSD induced Klingon battle. Mainly because there was no discussion or actual strategy. It was just, "let's just go that way, and hope nobody has any bat'leth, weapons (for the most part) and there aren't any locked doors on the way".
Unless I missed some dialogue (entirely possible), it would have been nice if they even addressed it in some form.
Besides that scene/sequence, the story and execution had great merit!
Unless I missed some dialogue (entirely possible), it would have been nice if they even addressed it in some form.
Besides that scene/sequence, the story and execution had great merit!
But noting in canon says the Romulan use it either. Though, as the D'deridex use singularities for power, maybe the smaller ships have to use M/AM and dilithium. Or maybe they don't and Romulans mine dilithium to trade/sell it with other nations. Would be nice to control a mineral resource other nations are dependent on, but you are not.
Using dilithium to channel power from a different reaction I guess could match with the little that has been explained about dilithium's properties, but seems like a post hoc justification to me. Feels like in addition to moderating the M/AM reaction, suddenly dilithium now also controls the flow of warp plasma and directs it to the warp coil (which would seem to be more of a magnetic/room temp superconductor job). But Sternbach is pretty much entitled to define whatever he wants.
As for the spore drive, it was said to be in a "descrete" subspace domain which could easily be explained as isolating it from the destruction of the "regular" FTL/subspace domains. I still think that works better than having all dilithium in the galaxy tied together on a fundamental level and reacting to some stupid, random technobabble event at one location. And wouldn't rely on not ever having developed any reliable non-dilithium-based transportation technology.
For the first point, see my above comments about Romulans and dilithium.
[pushed up glasses] Actually, the Omega molecule was mentioned in two whole Voyager episodes. [/glasses]
As for an allegory about scarce resources...I guess I never thought that was the point of that season of DIS. I think the dependence on dilithium was an excuse for the dissolution of future civilization, but I never felt it was about resource scarcity. I always felt it was more about themes of overcoming a disaster and overcoming distrust and mending the ties of society. But I guess it could also be considered to be about resources - but like a lot of what DIS attempted, not well done.
"whittering on"?... I had never heard of the word "wittering" before. Maybe it's a British English thing? Kind of insulting use, given that we are all on page 45 of a message board discussing the fictional technical minutia of Star Trek episodes. But to address your actual points - yeah, the "emotional" point about grief could have been an interesting one, if it had been applied to a character that we had any investment in or even any prior introduction to before the reveal. And if it hadn't introduced a profoundly non-sensical and handwavy emotional/technobabble "explanation" for a physical, season-long, and galaxy-scale problem. It was all of a piece with other Discovery approaches to storytelling, like when after 1.5 seasons, they decided to have an episode to basically introduce us to Airiam, give her a tragic backstory, and kill her off...like, "hey, we expect you to now care about this character for the first time because we gave her more than a single line of dialog and now she's dead, so we hope you care a lot about her death!" (shrug)
If they wanted to write a story about the power of grief, maybe they should have actually written the story (i.e., season) about that, rather than shoehorning it in at the last minute.
Reminds me a little of the ending of "Lost." That show's creators spent 6 years writing a mixed bag of interesting and less-than-interesting characters, exploring bizarre mysteries and strange occurrences, and crafting whole world of intrigue over the island and people's destinies. But in concluding the series, they didn't want to focus on any of the mysteries of the world and the story they had created the show around, but just upon the characters' relationships. They did a decent job of that, but dropped the ball on about 75% of what their show had supposedly been about throughout its run (at least in my opinion). And came off, to me, rather disingenuous for the showrunners to claim at the end that the viewers had missed the point and that "it was really all about the characters' stories all along."
(now maybe you can complain about my wittering, as this is quite the bit of text)
Done well enough because that's exactly the theme I took from it, as well as the power that trauma has to impact people for a long time in their lives, something Trek historically does poorly or infrequently in it's application.
There's some language in Picard that was just awful. But I think without doubt the bit I want to smash my screen at is Seven thinking grass means marijuana. It's just playing to stupid Americans who go "OOOHHHH THEY SAID MARUAJANA!". I see no reason why she would think that in the context.
And Rafi going "pro tip" I think it was. Eugh.
I haven't noticed too much nastiness in SNW at least.
And Rafi going "pro tip" I think it was. Eugh.
I haven't noticed too much nastiness in SNW at least.
Marijuana doesn't belong in Trek. That's ugly.
Actually, Seven thought "pot" meant marijuana. This is almost as bad, since it sounds very 1990s now (all the kids have called it weed mostly for the last 10-20 years).
Sounds closer to English spoken with an Irish accent to my ear.
DIS S3 is canon, and its explicit reference to every FTL-capable starship in the Milky Way Galaxy exploding as a result of the Burn rather firmly implies that Romulan singularity drives, if they still exist, use dilithium.
Of course... the Romulan people had reunified with the Vulcans and become part of the Federation before the Burn even happened. If you really want to imagine that the singularity drives don't use dilithium -- and there is zero evidence whatsoever that they don't use dilithium -- then you could just assume singularity drives went out of common usage when the Vulcans and Romulans reunified.
Seems improbable that interstellar trade could support such a massive long-term industry when the Romulans hid from the rest of local space for a hundred years and then became mostly recluses again for like eighty years.
And ST canon is full of those. Still doesn't mean it's a continuity error.
Well, I don't know what to say to that, because the allegory was pretty clear and it recurred in numerous S3 episodes. The post-Burn setting is at least in part an allegory about how advanced industrial society endures when fossil fuels are no longer abundant enough to sustain our current scale.
It's almost as rude as ignoring the dramatic heart of the story in favor of nitpicking over technobabble.
It took up two or three episodes. Hardly "shoe-horning it in at the last minute."
There is nothing wrong with marijuana or responsible adults using it.
I think the association of "pot" with marijuana is one that's likely to be an enduring idiom.
Does LSD make you tough enough to take down a bunch of Klingons?
The kids in the future are back to calling it "pot".
And the problem with that is?
We still use slag today that dates back centuries, why can’t the future use slang that dates back centuries?
I don’t think you know what LSD is.