Let's talk about the elephant in the room, this series violates Roddenberry's vision big time

Saru: Her mutiny notwithstanding, Michael Burnham is the smartest Starfleet officer I have ever known.
Lorca: Huh... <to Stamets> And he knows YOU.

 

I agree with you, the actor makes the character way more compelling than the Neanderthal script he has to navigate. He needs a moustache to twirl.

 

He has a tribble.

 

Lorca is my boy. He could be beating baby seals with a bald eagle and I'd still be rooting for him.

It's not 1987 anymore. Comparing awards is foolishness. The show's been on for 9 episodes. When Star Trek was winning awards, it was because it was good television, not because of everyone getting along and everything being happy. Also- have you watched DSC? The crew get along fine...but in a far more realistic way than the ridiculous portrayals in some of the other spinoffs. Again, let's not confuse personal tastes with quality drama.

Lorca for UFP President 2060. #THATSmypresident

 

Agree

It's a helluva lot more fun and entertaining than knowing from the opening credits that the captain is always going to be right and will the ethically/morally correct thing regardless of the pressures and circumstances.

 

I'm not 100% clear on what was Roddenberry's 'vision' because, bless him, he was rather inconsistent. I can buy that humanity is no longer at war with itself, and that the races of the Federation are broad monocultures representing different facets of the human personality but it's not as if they always agree.

Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway are at the top of a hierarchy and have to make decisions that kill people. Every one of them has argued with their subordinates. Kirk snaps a lot during crises, he has stand up rows with Bones on the bridge sometimes. Then we have frequent racism against Spock and others, ruthless commissioners and ambassadors, sex slaves, misogyny and so on...

Roddenberry's glossy utopian future had a lot of cracks in a very thin veneer.

Discovery is closer to what Enterprise should have been. It's the first show that seems to be featuring more women in the wider cast, and it's adopting popular modern storytelling techniques including moral dilemmas. It's fine.

It's not perfect - I don't like that all Klingons from every house have been given a make-over. I wish they would reign in the magical technology or at least pay lip service to the fact that Discovery is unusual: "Site to site transportation inside a warp field? Are you insane?" or "A starship with a Holodeck? Why do you get the five star treatment?" Little things that avoid riding roughshod over TOS canon (or what's left of it after Enterprise) would be nice.

But as for Roddenberry's vision? I think it was something he threw out there to stop others from doing things with the franchise that he didn't like but he wouldn't hesitate to ignore the rules himself when it led to something he did like. There is no perfect version of Star Trek IMO.

 

On the transporter "issue" they did give us just such a subtle hint in "Battle At The Binary Stars" (DSC), where what we could already see from the example of the Franklin in Beyond (built before ENT but lost more than a decade later), namely that transporters on older ships don't always get upgraded to the latest model, is reiterated:

BURNHAM: On Vulcan, lateral vector transporter technology has been discarded due to the massive amount of power it requires.
GEORGIOU: Starfleet has phased out that design as well. Shenzhou is old, but she gets us where we need to go.

Since the Enterprise predates the Discovery, perhaps by decades, there's no inconsistency in the latter having better transporters than the former. Those dots are quite simple enough to connect. Furthermore, the very first thing Saru tells us about Lorca in "Context Is For Kings" (DSC)—the very same episode in which we first see him nonchalantly employ intra-ship beaming—is that he "is a man who does not fear the things normal people fear." So that gives us extra coverage, as well.

As for the not-quite-a-Holodeck, not in the TNG sense, where substantial portions of the simulation were not holographic at all, but rather physically re-created on the fly by transporters and replicators, and where the boundaries were imperceptible even at the extreme periphery, per "Encounter At Farpoint"...

Roddenberry in The Making Of Star Trek, published 1968:

"MEN AND WOMEN ON A STARSHIP, SO LONG OUT OF CONTACT WITH EARTH AND SO LONG AWAY FROM OTHER PLANETS, TOO, WILL REQUIRE A FEELING OF FRESH AIR AND SKY AND WIND AND SCENTS. BECAUSE WE ARE, IN MANY RESPECTS, STILL ANIMALS, OUR MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM WILL REQUIRE THE FAMILIARITY OF THIS. MAN HAS BEEN TOO LONG A PART OF EARTH TO BE TOO LONG SEPARATED. THEREFORE WE INTEND TO BUILD A SIMULATED 'OUTDOOR' RECREATION AREA WHICH GIVES A REALISTIC FEELING OF SKY, BREEZES, PLANTS, FOUNTAINS, AND SO FORTH..."

"The Practical Joker" (TAS), aired 1974:













So, if those are the best examples of "riding roughshod over TOS canon" you can come up with, you don't have much of leg to stand on, there.

-MMoM

 

So, there should be racist jokes in there at the expense of another's person's ancestry?

Secondly, sounds like "The Cage" to me.

Why does Star Trek have to make me feel anything? There is nothing a show "should" do besides entertain.

 

Yeah there is a bit of tension between the characters, but no more so than previous series. There have also been plenty of positive interactions as well.

- Burnham's initial relationship with Gergiou
- Georgiou's posthumous message to Burnham
- Burnham giving Georgiou's telescope to Saru
- Burnham and Tilly's relationship
- Stamets and Culber's relationship
- Stamets interactions with Burnham in 'Magic makes the sanest man go mad'
- Burnham and Tilly freeing the tardigrade
- Saru moving passed his anger towards burnham
- The crew wanting to save the Pahvans
- Burnham's support for Tyler.

There are probably more examples that I can't think of at present. Conflict and tense interactions betweens characters is nothing new in Star Trek, take DS9 for example. People didn't like that the crew of DS9 were often in conflict. For the first and second season there was a lot of tension between the characters and many of the interactions were 'cold and hostile'. Eventually that changed and the characters began to work as a cohesive unit. There was still conflict though in later season, because that is what happens between people even if they are close friends. Even Voyager and Enterprise had their fair share of character conflict. Archer's feelings towards T'pol and Vulcan's in general was borderline racist.

Fictional characters, like real people need time to build relationships.

 

Agree

It's a helluva lot more interesting than starting right out with everyone as a cohesive unit who smiles knowingly at each other and winks through every crisis. I'd like to continue earning it with Discovery

 

Lorca also initiates transport with a casual command to the computer. This is also a step beyond TOS. I don't dispute that these things are possible at the time of TOS, just dangerous or unusual. It's the casualness because the writers were desensitised by TNG levets of tech. I'll be with Lorca's risky transports as long as he's the only one who's fine with it and someone ends up in a bulkhead at least once :-P

Well to be frank, I think site to site transportation is a Pandora's box they should never have opened because it has so many plot busting possibilities.

 

Again, we only deal with the Enterprise and her sisters in TOS. Depending on which background source one appeals to, as it was never specified onscreen, they are twenty-to-forty-year-old ships at that time. So Discovery, being a brand new ship ten years before TOS, indeed should be more advanced.

-MMoM

 

You make a valid point about the age of the Constitution class but the Enterprise herself is likely slightly younger than Discovery given that she had only one captain before Pike (Morrow's comments being apocryphal) , plus Scotty's dialogue in TOS was pretty clear - and he's THE expert in transporters. It was a step too far for nobody to bat an eyelid when you look at his reaction to how terrible an idea it is.

Of course in NuTrek he's keen to try it while at warp but I don't think that's where Discovery should set it's bar >

 

April was 75 circa 2270 per "The Counter-Clock Incident" (TAS), meaning he was born circa 2195, and could readily have been captain of the Enterprise from the late 2220s and still leave Kirk (born 2233, assumed command circa 2263 around age 30—but probably after having had a previous command—see here) as the youngest-ever captain of such a ship as per The Making Of Star Trek (which is the same source where the age of the design is said to be "about forty years" old). Not set in stone, of course. The Chronology and an unused and unseen portion of Archer's bio from "In A Mirror, Darkly" (ENT) place the Enterprise's launch in 2245. That would still be a decade before DSC.

Scotty performed site-to-site transport of an individual from one surface location to another, with no novelty value attributed, in "A Piece Of The Action" (TOS).

What concerns Spock about intra-ship beaming, pad-to-site, in "Day Of The Dove" (TOS) is the necessity of "pinpoint accuracy" due to the possibility of ending up materializing inside a deck or wall. But that would generally be a concern beaming just about anywhere, so I think you are quite sensible in presuming the complication must have something to do with some other function of the ship within the area of the destination potentially interfering with the process. Spock quite explicitly says it has been done, though, even if rarely because of this danger. Scotty accepts that it could work, even if it may be a trap. Spock makes computations and sets the computer to automatically perform the transport. And it ultimately all goes off without a hitch, despite it all being done hurriedly in the heat of the moment.

So Lorca actually does nothing they couldn't do in TOS, and is quite justified in feeling no apprehension, especially because in his case he's had the luxury of all the time in the world to have the computer programmed for such pre-set transports and work out any bugs! It can't possibly be a more complicated matter than getting the spore drive to work, methinks. Plus, again, quite possibly better transporters.

Sorry, I'm not just arguing for argument's sake here. I just think much more has been made of this than really ought be.

-MMoM

 

Oh yeah, Scotty's reasons for intra ship beaming are nonsense.
The presence of a warp field making it harder to perform pinpoint accuracy makes far more sense.

Site to site or beaming without communicators was an error generally. What, so Romulans and Klingons wouldn't use it as a weapon? Why even uncloak if you can beam the bridge crew of that unsuspecting ship into space and replace them with your crew? Power consumption issues are hand waved away because they use transporters so casually instead of just walking down a few decks.

 

Even more than a century later in DS9, the Defiant still had to de-cloak to use the transporter. Is there any instance of this not being true? I can't remember off the top of my head.

-MMoM

 

Is that you telling us that you don't like the Kirk-Spock-McCoy friendship?

 

I can see why you would need to decloak to beam someone up safely, but not sure why you'd need to if you were happy to splatter your targets all over the place. It's hard to say because the writers avoided any notions of weaponised transporters and allowed the heroes but not the villains to intercept incoming transporter signals unless vastly technologically superior.

TOS did demonstrate proximity sensors automatically raising Shields too I guess, even if most of the time they're shown being switched on manually. It then comes down to range I suppose. Is your targeting range better than automatic sensors even if you do have to decloak?

But if course there is lots of silly stuff relating to transporters in both directions such as manual decontamination (what about biome contamination both ways for example) and an inability to identify who is being beamed up, even if alien, without manual intervention.

 

The novelty of tech is pretty inconsistent in Trek. At the beginning of TNG holodecks are treated like special new technology, with characters walking in amazed at what they're experiencing during the first two seasons. But then by DS9 holo tech is treated as if common place. Then in VOY Janeway reminisces about her adventures in the holodeck as a child, over the same program Naomi plays in.

So with all that and TAS in mind, TNG's earlier episodes are kind of an outlier with holo tech being a novelty. It was likely treated as such in 1987 as if to retcon what was seen in TAS, as the rights were out of Paramount's hands at the time. Now it's all canon again.

 

Similarly, holographic viewscreens could be a matter of choice rather than tech. If other ships are shown using viewers instead, it's all perfectly consistent.

I'm a fan of the TMP refit because a lot of thought went into it and there isn't a Holodeck on any 'official' plan I've seen. I'm not sure if there might be room for a small one down by the swimming pool though.