The cgi was a bit iffy sometimes. Those stupid robots looked bad as well
Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x02 – “Beta Test”
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Starfleet's military. Always has been.
They convinced me.
At least the DOT robots are now in the 32nd century. They never looked nor felt right in the Pike and Kirk era.
There are supposed to be "canon people" working as producers... like Tawny Newsome and Kirsten Beyer, both in the writers room. So can anyone tell me how they missed that Betazoids have black eyes? (Deanna and Lwaxana Troi, Tam Elbrun, Lon Suder, the delegate from "Menage a Troi", etc.) And also that they are TELEPATHS, not empaths?
The Betazed storyline was the most interesting aspect of this one. I like how both they and the Federation make valid and good arguments for why they have their positions. Especially when you factor in that during the Dominion War, Betazed fell to the Dominion... in less than 10 hours. Who knows how any more times they fell victim to other battles between the Dominion War and the next 800 years, so I completely understand why they would want to stay separated from everyone else.
I do like the solution at the end... build the Federation Council headquarters on Betazed. That guarantees a force will be stationed there for protection at all times AND it gives Betazed true recognition as a prominent member of the Federation. An elegant solution.
By the way, great to see Admiral Vance more here. He was one of the few things that I truly liked about DISCO.
The teen drama was amped WAY higher in this one, which turned me off greatly.
It's interesting that Tarima chose to be part of the War College, but it makes sense. She wants to get out from behind the wall of her world, but she also feels an obligation and duty to help protect her world. Going to the War College instead of the Academy serves both interests. Could be interesting to see the result of this as the show progresses.
Caleb really annoys me. Not only his behavior in class, but how he acts everywhere else. He is getting away with FAR more than anyone else ever would, and he knows it. He's using it to his advantage a little TOO hard. A bit too "in your face" about it. I can't feel any sympathy for someone who keeps doing that, despite what he went through in those 15 years. He's abusing his breaks.
Speaking of class, glad to see Reno again. Another of the few aspects that DISCO did well.
Maybe I was hearing things, but was that the TOS theme I was hearing when the trash can was grabbing the fruitfly? If so, it's nice that they added it... but I don't like that it was added to THAT. It feels wrong to use it for trash.
The robots were funny... liked how the one was laughing.
This episode felt like it was trying to be COBRA KAI... but not a good version of it. The teen drama was even worse here than in the pilot, which makes this episode not work for me overall. Even with the Betazed story, I found myself disinterested through most of it.
This is a 4 for me.
The Betazed storyline was the most interesting aspect of this one. I like how both they and the Federation make valid and good arguments for why they have their positions. Especially when you factor in that during the Dominion War, Betazed fell to the Dominion... in less than 10 hours. Who knows how any more times they fell victim to other battles between the Dominion War and the next 800 years, so I completely understand why they would want to stay separated from everyone else.
I do like the solution at the end... build the Federation Council headquarters on Betazed. That guarantees a force will be stationed there for protection at all times AND it gives Betazed true recognition as a prominent member of the Federation. An elegant solution.
By the way, great to see Admiral Vance more here. He was one of the few things that I truly liked about DISCO.
The teen drama was amped WAY higher in this one, which turned me off greatly.
It's interesting that Tarima chose to be part of the War College, but it makes sense. She wants to get out from behind the wall of her world, but she also feels an obligation and duty to help protect her world. Going to the War College instead of the Academy serves both interests. Could be interesting to see the result of this as the show progresses.
Caleb really annoys me. Not only his behavior in class, but how he acts everywhere else. He is getting away with FAR more than anyone else ever would, and he knows it. He's using it to his advantage a little TOO hard. A bit too "in your face" about it. I can't feel any sympathy for someone who keeps doing that, despite what he went through in those 15 years. He's abusing his breaks.
Speaking of class, glad to see Reno again. Another of the few aspects that DISCO did well.
Maybe I was hearing things, but was that the TOS theme I was hearing when the trash can was grabbing the fruitfly? If so, it's nice that they added it... but I don't like that it was added to THAT. It feels wrong to use it for trash.
The robots were funny... liked how the one was laughing.
This episode felt like it was trying to be COBRA KAI... but not a good version of it. The teen drama was even worse here than in the pilot, which makes this episode not work for me overall. Even with the Betazed story, I found myself disinterested through most of it.
This is a 4 for me.
One could make the argument that the sample size of Betazoids we have seen just coincidentally had the same eye colour. It would be the same as the southern and northern Romulan thing. It hasn't been officially stated that all Betazoids have black eyes to the best of my recollection.
And they are empaths as well as telepaths. That ones a thin defence I'll grant you. In the trailers Tarima seems to have telekinesis as well, plus their psionic wall is definitely indicative of telepathy so it's probably just a phrasing thing and not an erasure of that ability. Unless they reveal the psionic wall used up all their telepathic potential leaving them with only empathic abilities.
They exist, but they aren't common compared to young races. Which is the opposite of what we should expect. Logically, when a race could exist for any period of time in space (from a few hundred years to billions) most of the races should be vastly older and more powerful than humanity.
Unless...something is clearing them out.
Like a lot of how tech is treated in Star Trek, all of these are treated as individual cases, not part of a general tend towards progress. Something like the spore drive literally getting invented only once in the entire multiverse is a great example.
This is actually my preferred answer to what happens when alien races advance too far. Indeed, my hope when Discovery jumped to the 32nd century is they'd find a largely empty quadrant, with mysteriously empty, abandoned cities. They'd slowly meet survivors - isolated luddite colonies, people stuck in transporter buffers, sentient holograms which were in standby, etc. Then by the end of the season they'd discover nothing bad happened to the Federation, it just reached the arbitrary point where they all ascended into being energy beings. Then the remainder of Discovery would be gathering up those left behind and building a new Federation with the remnants.
This is debatable. Star Trek 100% has Cartesian mind-body dualism, but Gene had a hard-and-fast rule that minds cannot survive without a physical substrate, and that they die for real if their consciousness hasn't been transferred to an android or something.
Something I forgot to mention.
Glad to see a Brikar here. Between that and the reference in the pilot, I'm glad PRODIGY is getting some love.
Glad to see a Brikar here. Between that and the reference in the pilot, I'm glad PRODIGY is getting some love.
Yet all the actors who played Betazoids would be given black contacts to wear for the express purpose of separating them from how humans looked. May not have been officially said on screen that all of them have black eyes, but the fact every single one we see in the Berman era had them kind of makes it canon that they do.
If I were to guess I'd say that Zoë Steiner probably couldn't handle the contacts, so they decided to just pretend that wasn't actually a thing.
And the Telepath part probably got lost in production, I'd guess it was Telepathy in the original script drafts that Tawny/Kristen saw, but then the director changed it for whatever reason and by the time they found out about it it was too late to go back and change things.
Surviving races aren't common.
Because most species dead end, get wiped out by something, or turn into energy beings.
We're only seeing tiny snapshots of things, Lower Decks actually gave us the widest view of actual life in the Star Trek galaxy and even that was small.
It hasn't been debatable since Lower Decks and the Black Mountain.
In some ways this episode had a very “Trek” sensibility. Its central plot and conflict was one that was rooted in sharing perspective and the tension in the episode was resolved by diplomacy and talking. Very Trek!
It remains better then I expected….
It remains better then I expected….
Well they're redesigned to have floating parts. We also saw them in Discovery's 32nd century seasons.
I think there's even a scene with the 23rd and 32nd century ones working together?
We also saw a variant in Picard Season 3
Heavy duty DOT
Heavy duty DOTs were a type of worker robot in operation in the early 25th century aboard Federation starships like the USS Titan-A. They were fitted with lasers which they used to conduct repairs. In April 2401, on stardate 78186.03, after having limped to the edge of the Alpha Quadrant the...
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I don't disagree that that was the intent, but the intent was also that all Romulans had forehead ridges until it just wasn't the case anymore and we saw a lot more of them than Betazoids.
I don’t disagree with that, either.
Maybe... but this just stuck out like a sore thumb (errrr, I mean eye) to me.
Given that there are multiple species out there with a range of different actual skull shapes, I think we can buy that at least some Betazoids have eye colors other than the most common one.
I noticed it immediately too. It's just one of those assumptions we have to let go of.
I noted it and then got over it.
Someone above them probably vetoed it.
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