Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x01 - "Kobayashi Maru"

Brain capacity does not work this way.

I can think of a few reasons? Like such simulations being really easy to manipulate for bad purposes?

Anyway, if one would rather the whole setting was just rewritten to be something else, then fair enough: but there are other sci-fi shows and properties.

 

And after Starfleet experiences with negative holographic environments like Hirogen hunting simulations I can see why Federation scientists, entrepreneurs and leaders might be reluctant to let holographic technology develop past a certain point due to the dangers of the holograms harming or killing living individuals.

 

any organ in the human body can be improved

 

There is no "improvement" that can make faster recall or better processing power the equivalent of morality and judgment. Those are just different things. You could improve the mechanics of cognition, but you cannot get perfected judgment, a better ability to learn from history, or the right call in every situation with improved "brain capacity."

Of course, one can always pitch a show where everybody is a disembodied hyper-fast AI. There are Greg Egan novels like that: for my money, they're utterly excruciating, but hey. Different strokes.

 

BS - Kirk learned that in the TOS second pilot - "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Kirk's relationship to Gary Mitchell at that time was very much like his relationship to Spock after 15+ years of serving together. The ONLY difference in tat we (the audience got to see that Kirk/Spock relationship develop; where in "Where No Man Has Gone Before"; the 'depth of the Kirk/Mitchell relationship was stated in dialogue.

But yes, Kirk made the hard choice of finally having to kill Gary Mitchell because there was no other way; and he made (and was ready to make - see TOS S1 - "Operation Annihilate" ) many other similar - so no it wasn't a lesson Kirk didn't learn until STII:TWoK; he was a GOOD Captain with the proper instincts, experience, and emotional capacity to very effectively take on the mantle of Starship command.

That's one thing I don't get about the Discovery writing team as if anything - the President's evaluation is spot on and Michael Burnham is not ready and doesn't have the emotional capacity to be a good Ship Captain. If anything, she should have been relived of command at the end given what the President saw of her performance; yet somehow, that's not going to happen.

So yeah, I gotta ask, what is the writing team thinking by showing Burhan's emotional incompetence right out of the gate in the first display of her captain abilities. Hell, she barely make a decent Executive/First Officer in that state they show her in.

It's hilarious to me that after making her Captain, the writing team immediately throws the character into the situation where she's still NOT the highest ranking officer on the ship - and shows that she's really a LOUSY captain. She is shown not having the emotional capacity to handle the real HARD decisions she may have to make - and yes, she could and (with a competent set of writers who don't have her always ultimately succeed just because she's the lead actress), get everyone killed and the ship and spore drive destroyed.

So yah, as far as her 'character arc' - it seems like it's amateur hour in the ST: D writing room. I did like a lot of aspects of this episode and would give it a 7 - but I really have to wonder why the writing staff wanted to show Burnham as so incompetent as a Captain out of the gate in Season 4.

 

feel like they're doing some kind of punch telegraphing that her or Saru will want captain's seat on the Voyager (well not much telegraphing, she very clearly wants it) , or even that Saru will get center-seat back on Discovery when his sabbatical is over.

 

Except the Butterflies did not tell them to fuck off. They opened fire on them for no reason. Had they simply said, "We don't trust you and don't want you on our planet. Leave now," they would have gotten what they wanted. Trying to kill Michael and Book was absolutely not reasonable.

I mean, the series literally starts with Michael realizing she's made a horrible mistake that started a war and cost her substitute mother-figure her life. And last season, we saw Vance start as a foil and end as someone they were learning from, without him making any sort of groveling apology and with Michael learning from him. So I don't think this is an accurate assertion at all.

I strongly suspect this is coming.

I'm sure you didn't mean to misgender them, but Adira is not a she, Adira is a they. Not saying that to be judgey -- letting go of the gender binary is hard when it's what you've been raised with! It's easy to automatically assign a non-binary person to a binary gender identity without realizing that that's what you've done. I've done that myself.

Anyway, I think Adira's arc has always been more than just "science prodigy" and "non-binary." Their arc was all about grief and how to move on from it. And I also think that it's extremely reductive and premature to take one scene about being nervous before a big career event and make that into "they're becoming the next Tilly."

He agrees!

I mean, it's basically the same progress as Nog on DS9. Nog had two seasons as a cadet (DS9 S4-5), two seasons as an ensign (DS9 S6-7), and then got promoted to lieutenant at the end of DS9 S7.

Tilly spent one season onscreen as a cadet (DIS S1), two seasons as an ensign (DIS S2-3), and now is a lieutenant. Presumably she had multiple years as a cadet before DIS S1, probably more years as a cadet than Nog.

Did Spock actually create the Kobayashi Maru test in ST09? Obviously he administered it, but was there any line establishing that he was the creator of the test concept?

It took me a little bit to get attached to it, but I've come to love the DIS theme song. The LD theme feels really generic to me.

PRO's theme is obviously amazing, what with it being Michael Giacchino.

I think that's true of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. I don't really think that's how Archer behaved. Frankly, Archer strikes me as too immature to even have a command philosophy.

Amusingly, I think that philosophy is definitely behind a lot of Captain Freeman's choices, but Starfleet makes her eat shit for it a lot. Guess that's what happens when your ship is California-class, even if it's not fair.

And I do think that TWOK was all about Kirk having to come to terms with this fact after avoiding it for all of TOS and TMP. I think the Kirk of the later films was a bit older and wiser that way.

Yep. Michael's arc this season is probably going to be a more detailed, better-developed version of Kirk's arc in TWOK.

On this, I think the Kelvin influence is overstated. Michael, even with her levels of inexperience, is more mature and thoughtful than Kelvin-Kirk; Kelvin-Kirk was written and acted much more broadly. Frankly, Michael's actions as captain so far strike me as being far more comparable to Kirk Prime during the TOS era.

I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that that's what the writers did by having the President name the new spacedock after Archer. Not everything has to be spelled out.

This is false. We literally saw Michael looking up Spock's history in "Unification III," and we saw the entire crew learning about the history of the past couple hundred years throughout S3, including solving a huge mystery about the past that no one else had solved.

Do we see them reading the Space Wikipedia articles about everything that's happened from 2258 to 3188? No, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen off-screen. The show isn't about that, so the writers are not going to waste time showing them doing a thing the audience can already reasonably infer the characters were doing.

I'm sorry, but that would not have been good writing. That would have been pedantic ST trivia-wank. Kirk did not actually "beat" the Kobayashi Maru, because he cheated and reprogrammed it. The President was correct in asserting that nobody has ever beaten the test, and the writers made a good decision in not invoking Kirk in dialogue.

Two biological consciousnesses sharing a brain with one of them needing to be extracted without harming the other is a very, very different thing from a computer program on a holo-projector or a single consciousness being removed from a dying brain.

This just sounds like more trivia-wank to me. I wouldn't object to it being there in a short, light scene of exposition, but its absence doesn't harm the show either.

I think it works in this context -- the Federation has clearly not faced a planet-killer in centuries, and no one knows what caused this. I also think ST has done planet-killers pretty often in its history -- the Doomsday Machine? the Crystalline Entity? -- without getting shit about it before.

Why would it hold more meaning? None of the characters we see this season are Klingon. President Rallik has Cardassian and Bajoran heritage, but we don't know if she's attached to either planet. Book is the character we've spent the most time with between him and Rallik, and Kwejian was his home and a planet we've spent time on in this show.

Again: one scene. This is an incredibly reductive way to describe one scene of nervousness.

Honestly if you look at the history of genre television, it seems pretty clear that the concept of having a single over-arching conflict and villain for each season goes back to Joss Whedon's work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That practice influenced a huge number of subsequent shows, including Russell T. Davies and his successors on Doctor Who, and probably the producers of ENT S3 yes. But it's become extremely common on a lot of genre TV shows.

We're one episode in. Don't you think it's a little premature to say S4's arc isn't working?

They opened negotiations in bad faith and then tried to murder two diplomatic envoys instead of just telling them to leave. That's pretty damn wrong.

They did not talk down to the Butterflies. Michael was extremely respectful of them, but the Butterflies decided to prioritize their feelings of hostility over reason. Had they given Michael a short amount of time to explain that Grudge the Cat is not actually an imprisoned head of state and that referring to her as a "queen" was a metaphor, they would have seen there was no reason for violence.

Michael's improvised response to unwarranted hostility was to demonstrate good faith by refusing to fire back and by helping them repair technology they couldn't repair on their own, even if doing so meant sacrificing her own life.

That is a really good point!

I think the point is that Burnham is ready to be captain, but she's still a junior captain who needs to continue to gain experience as C.O. before she'll be ready for more responsibility.

Like, you don't promote someone to regional manager without having them be general manager first. Same principle.

I mean, yes and no? She did still fire the first shot against the Torchbearer.

Yeah, captains who are main characters go off-ship for adventures all the time in lots of shows including ST.

Honestly, I think it's a function of the fact that we the audience have just seen too many death-defying action sequences in too many productions. The writers are reacting to the need to keep the audience from getting bored, hence the semi-meta nature of these kinds of quips.

I think that's what Stamets did in the S3 finale, isn't it? He was furious that Michael was willing to prioritize the ship over Hugh, Adira, Saru, and Gray. "They're my family!" And he still seems pretty pissed at her in this episode.

Well-known fan, podcast host, was involved in the Axanar thing, but most significantly he's produced, written, and directed a lot of DVD/Blu-Ray special content features over the years, and that's made him a minor character at the edge of Hollywood and given him clout in fandom.

?????

When. Please tell me when, and please tell me what a better acting choice would have been.

 

He was a good captain with good instincts, but he was also a captain who didn't so much accept death as go into denial about it. I mean, his brother dies in "Operation Annihilate," and yet he never so much as mentions it again the rest of the series. His best friend dies at his hand in "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and he immediately replaces Gary with Spock and never mentions Gary again.

Sorry, but Kirk had some issues.

The President never once said Michael wasn't ready or didn't have the emotional capacity to be a good ship captain. She said that Burnham needs more experience as ship captain. Those are very different things.

She should be relieved of command for successfully rescuing all but three station crewmembers? That is not a reasonable reaction.

Showing a flaw is not the same thing as emotional incompetence, particularly when she accomplished as much as anyone possibly could have in those circumstances.

They did no such thing.

Your inability to criticize the DIS writers without accusing them of being "amateurs" does not speak well to the quality of your argument.

 

He was a HUGE part of the AXANAR fan film debacle (the folks who decry that ST: D isn't Trek because it's 'too militaristic' - yet the fan film they supposedly wanted to make is 100% a Trek military war film). They started in 2014 - and in 2021 as still talking crap and managed to get sued (and lost as the settlement they reached with Paramount was contained all the things they said they's NEVER agree to...yeah, they claimed they'd appeal all the way to the SCOTUS... And Mr. Burnett until his falling out with Alec Peters over money was right there with the rest of them claiming somehow that Paramount no longer held rights to the Star Trek IP and that they felt all the elements of their take were now in the Public Domain.)

He left after he realized unlike Peters - who has taken and spent over $2 million in pledge funds and produced NOTHING but a few 2 minute trailers - that he wasn't going to get his hands on any of that money for himself; or somehow use the film to break farther into the Hollywood film production scene than he has to date; and he still somehow thinks that he 'knows Trek' better than the current folks actually hired by CBS/Paramount - and who have since 2017, produced multiple seasons of 'Star Trek: Discovery', a bunch of 'Short Treks' <--- and would have done more if not for the COVID-19 situation and the protocols required to film anything safely; 'Picard' (filming it's second and third seasons back to back), 'Lower Decks', 'Star Trek: Prodigy' and the soon to be released 'Strange New Worlds' (the live action for the first season has completed filming and they're in post production - AND - if rumors are true, have been greenlit for Season 2 and will start filming the live action for in in February 2022).

but yeah, because RMB was involved with a small Trek fandom related film "Free Enterprise" - and his past involvement with the continuing Fan Film disaster (and total ripoff for money) that is AXANAR - yes, somehow he feels he's an "Expert of True Star Trek™"

 

Another cringe inducing episode of Discovery in the books.

If it hasn't gotten by now, it never will.

This show is incredibly cheap.

 

See you next week.

 

It's like listening to the guy who played two years of JV Football in High School 20 years ago tell you what an idiot the coach of the NFL team you are watching is.

 

Yes, Kirk definitely did - as all dramatic characters do - BUT, he was shown again and again to be fully able to make the hard decisions and know when to sacrifice someone to save the ship/crew, etc. yes, he agonized over it during and afterwards; but unlike Burnham, he knows and accepts he "can't save everyone..."

If you look at the exchange between her and the President, yes, by Burham having the belief she "can save everyone ..." - she makes very bad decisions and that shows she's NOT ready to be the Captain in Command of a Starship. (It's similar to what happened to Kelvin Kirk at the start of "Star Trek: Into Darkness" the 1701 was taken from him - and Pike was going to take him as his Exec./First Officer tp mentor him because due to that exact attitude display by Burham in the episode we're discussing - he showed to Pike he wasn't ready for the 'Big Chair') <--- and that's the exact same type of attitude Burham displayed here, which yes, shows she's also still not ready to be Captain of a ship.

Again, the discussion they had clearly shows she's not really ready for the full responsibility pof Starship command, by her responses and the attitude she displayed.

Guess we agree to disagree.

I call it as I see it, and yeah, I actually kind of like the Burnham character, so to see them use such a tired old trope to give her yet another 'big growth character arc' - yeah, given their experience they should do better than that IMO. it's lazy writing.

 

Point of order: That was "Into Darkness."

Also, Kirk did a great job learning from that arc and I expect the same from Burnham. If it's lazy writing then I am a lazy viewer.

 

President Rillah's opinion is that Burnham's resume qualifies her for the Captain's chair, but that her personal experiences and savior complex mean she lacks the appropriate mindset to be a Captain because she doesn't know how to/can't see when sacrifices might be necessary.

Others, namely Admiral Vance, Sara, and the rest of the Discovery crew, would likely disagree.

 

Doh - brain fart on my part - thanks, and corrected.

 

The were holding a queen hostage. That's why the butterflies shot at them

 

Except Burnham literally made that same choice, to risk sacrificing some to save the many, in "That Hope Is You, Part II." That was why Stamets was so furious with her -- she was willing to sacrifice the away team (Hugh, Adira, Gray, and Saru) to save the ship.

So it's not that Michael is incapable of making that choice. It's that she -- like Kirk -- has a deep need to avoid that choice, and goes into a state of denial about how things could have worked after the fact.

Every single decision she made in "Kobayashi Maru" was the best possible decision and the outcome achieved was the best possible outcome. She really was the person best qualified to operate the Worker Bee and remove the debris in a shortest period of time. They saved as many people as was possible.

Her need to save everyone didn't prevent her from making good decisions in the moment. It caused her to second-guess herself and feel irrationally guilty after the fact.

She is as ready as Captain Kirk was in TOS.

You are holding her to a double standard to which other captains aren't held.

Then your eyesight is bad.

ETA:

The Butterflies were aware from the earlier discussion over the phrase "no strings attached" that idioms and metaphors with non-linear meanings were a part of Michael's and Book's way of communicating, and Michael had already explained that Grudge was a domesticated non-sapient pet. She attempted to explain that "queen" was a metaphor, and they ignored her and attempted to kill her. This is not negotiating in good faith and is a literal violation of international law in real life.

 

But also, Kirk's lesson was to be learned from falsifying a log entry as well as violating the Prime Directive, in the name of trying to save everyone.

Burnham wants to be the center of everything for the sake of being the center of everything. I don't see any other reason why she's doing the things she's been doing.

And I am tired of hearing the comparisons with Kirk. One example: "The Immunity Syndrome". Had it been Burnham, she'd have disregarded Spock and McCoy to take the shuttle into the amoeba herself, no matter what they said, just so she could be the one to give a teary eyed look at the camera afterward that she saved everyone.

Kirk understood that, despite being the best pilot, other talents would be needed and had to realize that someone else would need to go, and most likely not be returning. He made the decision who it would need to be, agonized over it, and still made that choice knowing the sacrifices.

The Federation President was right: Burnham is not suited for command of a cutting edge starship. Given Burnham's record of mutiny and starting a war, disregarding orders from a commanding officer numerous times, etc. shows that she isn't suited for it.

Yes, Kirk disobeyed orders, but not all the time. And if the time came, he knew to delegate responsibility to others.

 

The President's pretty shrewd though. Punishing Burnham after her triumphant reversal of the Burn and cinematic showdown with Osyraa would be bad PR for the Federation. So she can't relieve Burnham of command. Yet. Or even reassign her to a non spore drive ship. BUT, the specs for the spore drive have now been duplicated and Burnham and her ship are no longer special, thus protecting the Federation if she does indeed get herself and her crew killed on some foolish idealistic crusade.