Apparently you are only allowed in the Discovery forum if you're waving your pom-poms.
Spoilers A big hint about the finale/season 3 has dropped...
- Thread starter eschaton
- Start date
Apparently you are only allowed in the Discovery forum if you're waving your pom-poms.
More unjust bashing of the warp salamanders. Threshold's problem is that it's a really boring and pointless episode, but the idea that going at Warp 10 causes you to exist in all of space at once, shatters your mind, and then sends your DNA through a paper shredder is cool as hell, and far from the stupidest thing seen in Star Trek. It reminds me a lot of that great early Twilight Zone episode where the astronauts return from space and just start disappearing from existence - the idea that there are some things in space that humans were never meant to do, and unreal consequences are incurred when we attempt it anyway.
The spore drive is on pretty similar ground, in that sense. It's a really cool idea (IMO, obviously) that there's a giant network of spores connecting the whole galaxy/universe and that it's theoretically possible to use them to transport a ship to any location, and on top of that the spores are actually sentient creatures. The problem is that the show has done absolutely piss-all with it, bar using it as a weapon against Klingons and going to the beta quadrant for 5 seconds to visit a church. We can go anywhere and do anything, and so we're sitting around in Federation space crying and getting into familial fights while the magic-shroom-machine that can send us to places we've never even dreamed of gathers dust.
The spore drive is on pretty similar ground, in that sense. It's a really cool idea (IMO, obviously) that there's a giant network of spores connecting the whole galaxy/universe and that it's theoretically possible to use them to transport a ship to any location, and on top of that the spores are actually sentient creatures. The problem is that the show has done absolutely piss-all with it, bar using it as a weapon against Klingons and going to the beta quadrant for 5 seconds to visit a church. We can go anywhere and do anything, and so we're sitting around in Federation space crying and getting into familial fights while the magic-shroom-machine that can send us to places we've never even dreamed of gathers dust.
This is really a good point. I really don't like the spore drive even as a concept, but my frustration is exacerbated by the fact that the whole thing is so unnecessary. If you add such a ludicrous concept to the setting then you better to do something really cool and unique with it!
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In fairness, I am pretty sure that the mycelial network was a Berg/Harberts idea - or at least from someone else on the writer's team from season 1 which didn't continue on till the end of season 2. They may have realized the consequences of it were so vast that it basically made conventional Trek storytelling impossible. For example, most plots of the week could be easily solved by jumping back in time. This includes the Klingon War itself! Rather than go this route, they just decided to ignore it.
Of course, in Season 2, they decided to invent an entirely new type of magic tech - the Red Angel suit - which has even greater powers. The cast is just building one right now however, and hopefully they will find some way to either render it completely unusable for season 3 or actually have a plot which deals with its ramifications.
That crossed my mind too. If that is indeed the case, and the current writers don't want the spore drive anymore, it puzzles me why they didn't take the extremely obvious way out during the episodes with May - just say that shroom jumping hurts/kills May's people, in a way that can't be avoided. 10 minute scene where Pike apologises on behalf of the Federation, and negotiates an agreement with May to dismantle the spore drive and ensure that Federation scientists never again interfere with the network. Sort of messy and obviously a quick way to write it out of the show, but it's a very Star Trek themed solution and gives us a logical enough reason why the spore drive is apparently never mentioned ever again.
In fact, did they say something like this? I remember May implying the spore jumps were destroying the network, but I honestly got confused during the episode and haven't rewatched it.
Of course, we then have to wonder why nobody else in the entire universe seems to have discovered and mastered shroom jumping, but that was already an issue that existed the moment the concept was introduced.
They don't want to completely cut themselves off from it, in case they write themselves into a corner down the road.
This is why I agree with MU Georgiou that there are no bad ideas, but that there is lousy execution. So creating a supernova bad, simulating a supernova good. Same idea, different execution. We've only seen 2 Disco stories however, and yes they have been grounded in saving the Federation, as exploration doesn't do a whole lot of good if there's no home to go back to. However, it does look like season 3 will be quite a bit more unmoored so we will hopefully have that to look forwards to.
Unfortunately, Trek has a long, long history of treating technological innovations as on-time plot devices which - if they are shelved - are never invented again anywhere in the universe, rather than an inevitable series of discoveries that a society of sentient beings makes as they discover the underlying physical laws which govern the universe.
The threat was Culber making the poison tree bark mobile, not the jumps. And we already know that intelligent life forms use the nework for jumping. The tardigrade does. And a network like this explains how super evolved life forms like the Q and similar could be pulling their tricks as well.
True. Though at least for me the issue is far easier to overlook if the buried tech was some one off in an episodic show rather than one of the central premises in a seriealised show.
Oh, believe me, I was on the other side of this one back in the Enterprise days. We so wanted the "haters" gone.
This is why I have such a difficult time taking this critique seriously. Apparently DSC is supposed to be just like Star Trek except when it is too much like Star Trek???
Also, don't take me as a detractor of Disco either, It's my joint second favourite Trek atm. (DS9 being top, partly because it still feels the most in depth, and TNG being the other joint second). And yes, there are individual episodes of all the other series that I have problems with (but actually can't really think of any from DS9).
However, I do think there are a lot of conceptual and plot problems with Disco, mostly to keep the stakes high enough for the actions of the characters to make sense. And, I'm mostly OK with the problems, but I sometimes feel the need to side with those being critical. You might, however, note that I more often side against the critics.
My specific problem with the spore drive is that they've said too many things about it across the first series that they add up to become a lot more ridiculous than most trek concepts. Any one of them is fine on its own, but so far, the cumulative exposition about it has me eyerolling at times.
It still doesn't bother me as much as the warp 10 thing in Threshold. The lizards, I'm fine with, the idea that warp 10 was only just out of reach, and a small step away, I never was, and never will be.
I'm also, probably not the only person here that had no access to the internet the last time there was new Trek on TV, and I don't spend much time discussing the old stuff, so any criticisms often go unsaid.
Tldr version: I like Disco, but I do have problems with writing on it, and all Trek. Not that U don't think the writers aren't doing a good job either. I'm betting their constraints are very high.
That’s really big of you to admit that you’re doing exactly what you hate seeing other people do. Thank you for that.
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My Pom-Poms are a bit to low to be waving around, so I guess I shouldn't be hanging around here either.
Beyond that this is pretty common in Trek series to go back and forth on what any given concept is capable of in any given story, its also realistic in how new science discoverys and technologies are presented to us.
In the real world, we get, "miracle this" and "miracle that" until things settle down and we realize what something is actually capable of doing, or what the threat of something turns out to be after numerous studies.
I know that many fans want something 'fixed' and to work within reliable set parameters and see this fluxuation as a flaw, where I just look out my window on the world and see the same mixed messages about just about everything as those for and against jostle for attention and it takes some time to figure out what is fact or fiction. And I take that perspective into what i watch.
You're welcome. It's not a problem for me.
It's always the same issue, which is living with the presence of other people who continue to state opinions one vociferously dislikes; doesn't really matter where one is standing on the circle.
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Gonna pass on seeing Dennis wave his pom poms.
