Things you HATED about this show. As much as there are positives about STD there is much CRINGE!

She reminds me of Rey, too. Always making the googley eyes.

 

Basically everything was terrible, ESPECIALLY the Klingons. Are we sure STD isn't just a really bad redub of an unrelated TV series, with a Star Trek label slapped on it, like they did with Power Rangers?

 

Yeahh the two major things that I 'hated' (maybe too strong a word?) were Michelle Yeoh's acting (very disappointed becase I expected to really like her but her dialogue was more wooden than the Klingons speaking through prosthetics and there was no sense of character or 'captainness' from her). Secondly, despite the talk of trauma and all these roundabout explanations, I found Burnham's actions incomprehensible. Even if the writers intended to make this understandable through the lens of delayed PTSD, I don't think it is a very good way to introduce our ostensible hero - there is just nothing justifiable, logically or emotionally, about her actions. She is such an unforgivaby bad officer that I feel they have written themselves into a hole from which redemption might be too big a stretch.
Not to mention how hard you could feel the writers scrambling for explanations of her actions so it felt WAY too contrived. They obviously thought about what they wanted her to do before ever thinking about why and how she would ever do such a thing.

If there is anything redeeming about Burnham, it is Sonequa Martin-Green's acting, which I really can't fault and I just wish she had better writing to work with.

Having said all that I am NOT an overall hater. Unlike many, I think, I seriously want to love this show and tonight I'll watch episode 3...I am totally open to them convincing me I am wrong and Burnham is a complex and believable character who will have great rapport with her next captain. I want to be convinced!

 

PTSD is not logical, there are countless stories of military veterans with similar emotional reactions to Burnham. I remember reading about an army veteran who was afraid of plastic shopping bags because she associated them with a bomb that killed her squad mates. This veteran talked about how one day she was driving and there was plastic bag blowing on the road. She was forced to pull over because she started having a panic attack because all she could think about was how a plastic bag was once used to kill her friends. What happened to Burnham is what happens to someone when they suffering from PTSD. She came face to face with the people who killed her parents and broke down. It's totally understandable and realistic that someone who was taught to suppress their emotions instead of dealing with them would have responded like Burnham did.

 

I just came here to discuss Ep3, and something that caught my eye and had me cringing was "STD."

Is it ST? STTNG? STDS9? STV? STE?

No.

It's TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and DSC.

Be Star Trek, people.

 

Good and thought-provoking points.
I will give this more thought as well as seeing how this is portrayed in future episodes (i.e. will the writers explore this reasoning in more depth?).
I am still somewhat dubious though because I feel like she is also trained in self-control to a high level and she is a supposedly highly qualified and competent commandong officer. A mental collapse that would leave her in a terrible emotional state due to the presence of the race she fears and hates, I can buy, absolutely. Jumping to mutiny despite all her training? It feels melodramatic but it also stretches my ability to view her just as someone who made mistakes or suffered from relatable flaws - it sends her worryingly over the brink into a gung-ho crusade mentality based on her presumptions about another culture (even if not necessarily race).

Now, it is possible that I am expecting a hero where I should be expecting a protagonist. Hell, Walter White's terrible actions don't stop him from being a fantastic protagonist in Breaking Bad - he is just not what I'd call a hero. So I might be looking at Trek with an expectation of heroism when they are not going for that. They just want to present a deeply flawed protagonist that we don't necessarily have to root for. Whether that is the right direction for Star Trek is what then becomes the question..

 

"STD" seems to have caught on as everyone is using it, including those who really like the show. I just use "Discovery" or "Disc."

 

I wish it was more like Axanar.

 

The difference being that the Discovery people using your money to pay for their cars, their health insurance and their girlfriend's phone bills actually have the legal right to do so.

 

No, sadly. The people who actually own Star Trek are making official product, using the money they take in to make other productions for their network (more than just 20 minute green screen films that cost over a million dollars).

 

I liked the third episode better, but it seems to have confirmed that this show will be a "slow burn" Netflix-style drama where barely anything happens in each episode. I think that's okay as long as the plot is really complex enough to justify all those episodes, and if all the loose ends get tied up. Series' like Lost are incredibly frustrating when whole plotlines get dropped and the entire thing ends up fizzling out because the writers didn't plan out where they wanted to take it. DS9 handled this well because they only made Dominion war episodes when they actually had an interesting idea, but they also did self-contained episodes sometimes.

I also really hate the violence/gore in Discovery. Especially because it didn't really seem to *mean* that much. An accident caused a bunch of people to get mutilated, but there was no larger moral theme that gore was trying to get across. It just felt tasteless, and contributes to the dystopian tone. The Discoverse isn't one I would want to live in, unlike all the previous series.

 

So can we just vent here about anything Discovery related without fear of reprisal?

 

This guy's review hits pretty much all the talking points in a surprisingly tactful and engaging way.

 

Sorry, I won't be click baited with that video. That video (youtube?) is pointless, so I won't click and watch it. To each to their own.

 

I don't like a lot of things of Discovery, but the first one is the transparent/ holographic screens

 

I can get not liking it. But really it makes a damned lot of sense at this point in the trek timeline

 

I'm back with more weekly hatred. Strap in, lads and dragon queens.

I hate that Sylvia Tilly is only in 33% of Star Trek: Discovery episodes aired thus far.

I hate that nobody has said "threat ganglia" on screen as of yet.

I hate that we haven't seen Ensign Daft Punk since Sunday, September 24th.

I hate that stylistic preferences in the writing have prohibited us from actually reading any of Lorca's fortune cookies.

I hate knowing that there are fortunes to be read, visible on the TV screen, and yet I can't loop around with the camera and zoom in to read them. You know. Like some kind of Mars Rover multimedia CD learning module from, like, 1999. I wasn't the only kid with one of these, right?

I hate that the alien creature won't officially be named Lorca's Kitty. Memory Alpha is going to have a page up with, like, unidentified quadrupedal aristocrat, ruining everything. I won't even look. I'm not looking. You look.

I hate that there's this, like, I don't know, two-second span during Lorca's otherwise-sublime speech near the end where it looks and sounds mildly like they added a dubbed line in post-production.

I hate the tribble. Feed it to Lorca's Kitty. Save the ship. Save the show. Save the universe.

 

I've never been a fan of the big-ass windows with blue-colored pop-ups on them as viewscreens, but that ship has sailed. The U.S.S. Kelvin had them in the Prime timeline before the Narada appeared and changed history and that means the window viewscreen existed as early as 2233 in the continuity we've been following ever since TOS. It's not a Kelvin timeline thing except to the extent that the Kelvin's bridge still had it after Nero emerged from the black hole and opened fire on the ship.

Besides, if you don't like it just remember it won't exist a decade later, at least not on any Federation starships we see.

 

Idris Elba's old ship in Beyond had the window/(funky 80's green) HUD combo too.

 

Likes:

Burnham
Lorca
Saru

The asthetics

More adult themes

Dislikes:

Look of the Klingons
A bit tooo dark of a tone