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Starfleet Academy General Discussion Thread

Even if that were the case, which it is not, I would have no problem with that. I loved Discovery.

There's just no pleasing some people. :shifty:

If the characters don't show ANY emotion, they're called "robots" and "mannequins".

If they show any emotion at ALL, they're called "emo" and "unprofessional"! :rolleyes:

One of the things that bugged me about Voyager was that the crew was expected to keep a stiff upper lip even when faced with the possibility of not making it back to earth in their lifetimes! :eek:
 
There's just no pleasing some people. :shifty:

If the characters don't show ANY emotion, they're called "robots" and "mannequins".

If they show any emotion at ALL, they're called "emo" and "unprofessional"! :rolleyes:

One of the things that bugged me about Voyager was that the crew was expected to keep a stiff upper lip even when faced with the possibility of not making it back to earth in their lifetimes! :eek:
Well, humanity has evolved past petty concerns of *checks notes* never seeing home again.
 
There's just no pleasing some people. :shifty:

If the characters don't show ANY emotion, they're called "robots" and "mannequins".

If they show any emotion at ALL, they're called "emo" and "unprofessional"! :rolleyes:

One of the things that bugged me about Voyager was that the crew was expected to keep a stiff upper lip even when faced with the possibility of not making it back to earth in their lifetimes! :eek:
And one of the few episodes where they show genuine, tortured emotions is "Course: Oblivion," wherein the crew we see for all but one minute of the episode is a biomimetic("silver blood") copy of the original ship and her crew.
 
Nothing wrong with the crew having emotions. But their is a difference between drama and melodrama. Discovery went very much into the melodrama approach. The biggest flaw though was their wasn't much character conflict. All the characters are basically the same sort of modern liberal template were they pretty much share the exact same worldview on every issue. That is why everyone is always smiling and hugging and telling each other how awesome they are in ever scene it felt like.

The show would have been better if Lorca had stayed a regular and Stamets had stayed kind of a jerk to people. They tried to replicate that with Georgiou but they never treated her seriously. She was written like a snarky cartoon. The alien Captain in the final season was actually a good attempt at bringing some more internal conflict but by then it was to little to late for the show.

I much prefer how like in TOS you have Kirk/Spock/Bones all having very different personalities and how they bounce off each other and banter and sometimes even get into real arguments. Or how on DS9 you had Starfleet people and aliens who have agendas not connected to Starfleet all living together on the same space station. You even have a terrorist, a crook and someone who worked with the Carddisians working side by side with Starfleet people who themselves had flaws not typical of lots of Starfleet characters.
 
Nothing wrong with the crew having emotions. But their is a difference between drama and melodrama. Discovery went very much into the melodrama approach. The biggest flaw though was their wasn't much character conflict. All the characters are basically the same sort of modern liberal template were they pretty much share the exact same worldview on every issue. That is why everyone is always smiling and hugging and telling each other how awesome they are in ever scene it felt like.

It's not so much that they were all in agreeance, it's that they were all open as well. Repressed characters make for great drama! Think about Worf, or O'Brien, or Odo - all of them massively fucked up in some way, but they just choked down their trauma and went on with their days - which made the times when they actually broke down much more memorable.

Instead the dynamic you got - with pretty much every emotional scene post Season 2 - was character A poured their little heart out, whilst character B sat their patiently as a good friend.

How much better would it have been if Stamets was like "Sorry, I'm too busy for your bullshit right now, I've got a deadline!"
 
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It's not so much that they were all in agreeance, it's that they were all open as well. Repressed characters make for great drama! Think about Worf, or O'Brien, or Odo - all of them massively fucked up in some way, but they just choked down their trauma and went on with their days - which made the times when they actually broke down much more memorable.

Instead the dynamic you got - with pretty much every emotional scene post Season 2 - was character A poured their little heart out, whilst character B sat their patiently as a good friend.

How much better would it have been if Stamets was like "Sorry, I'm too busy for your bullshit right now, I've got a deadline!"

What I have noticed is sometimes in modern shows and movies is they mistake trauma for character flaws. When in reality what makes trauma so interesting to explore is when it negatively impacts a persons personality or behavior. Trauma needs to be more than characters just sitting around feeling sad and mopey. It needs to actually complicate their lives in some way and often cause trouble for other characters as well.
 
As Eric Clapton said, "It's in the way that you use it."

The way that Disco went about it with the third-tier characters was just embarrassing. A one-off backstory dump during a time crunch is worse than no backstory at all.
 
IMO they should have did what SNW did and move away from season arcs. Also Burnham works better as a action character than trying to make her super deep and all that. In fact the show should have went that route. I think it would have been neat if in season 2 Lorca is removed from command but stays on the show for plot reasons.

Saru becomes Captain and has to deal with a new first officer who actually has more command experience than him but has person demons that keeps her from being promoted. Burnham is put in charge of a mission team that includes her,Lorca,Culber and Owosekun and TIlly replaces Owosekun at her old post as a new member of the bridge crew. Stamets is made Chief Engineer and they give him a new set to work in. The ship could be flying around stopping a crime spree that broke out because of the Klingon War from the previous seasons and lots of criminal overlords thought they could exploit the fact that Starfleet was to busy fighting the war to keep the peace in some territories.
 
What I have noticed is sometimes in modern shows and movies is they mistake trauma for character flaws. When in reality what makes trauma so interesting to explore is when it negatively impacts a persons personality or behavior. Trauma needs to be more than characters just sitting around feeling sad and mopey. It needs to actually complicate their lives in some way and often cause trouble for other characters as well.
Oiy...that's not what trauma does though. "Trouble for other characters?" Da fuq?
 
It kinda does? I mean, a common trauma response is trust issues, and a distrustful character can cause issues for others.
Yes, it does, but that's not "trouble for other characters" at least to me. And people often still function through trauma despite the mistrust.

That's drama and communication.
 
It affects what you do, how you do it, how you react to what others do and say.
Indeed, and perhaps I'm reading too much in to "trouble" for other characters. Certainly it impacts reactions but that's not trouble, automatically. Often trauma is a personal struggle that manifests in creating distance in reactions or hypervigalence, paranoia, dreams and intrusive thoughts.

I think Detmer did perhaps the best, and Sisko a close second in Star Trek.
 
Indeed, and perhaps I'm reading too much in to "trouble" for other characters. Certainly it impacts reactions but that's not trouble, automatically. Often trauma is a personal struggle that manifests in creating distance in reactions or hypervigalence, paranoia, dreams and intrusive thoughts.

I think Detmer did perhaps the best, and Sisko a close second in Star Trek.

Trouble in fiction means conflict, as conflict is what makes things interesting in stories.

Due to the structure of Star Trek as a show, characters can't really have conflicting goals, unless they're something tangential to the mission at hand, like a relationship. Unless you do like DS9, and dispense with the idea that most of the cast is Starfleet. But characters can have different ideas of how to approach a goal, which can lead to conflict. Like Worf on TNG always coming forward with a bad idea in the Ready Room on how to deal with a problem.

Early DIS had plenty of conflict, of course, but starting with Season 3, they leaned hard into conflict avoidance, other than Georgiou being the turd in the punchbowl (replaced by Rayner in Season 5). Otherwise, everything smoothed out to blandness. A great example was the breakup of Adira and Gray, which was made zero drama. A breakup of two young people, in fiction, with zero conflict. WTF?
 
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