Disagree. I'd rather judge it on its own merits (acting, SFX, sets, costuming...) rather than how well it fits in with a show from 50 years ago. Most of those things brought up in those 117 page are insignificant minutia. Fun trivia at best
Poll Do you consider Discovery to truly be in the Prime Timeline at this point?
- Thread starter Annorax849
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I'm not arguing that it is a vision of THE future, but also that it expands from our current history.
I don't think true omniscience has been the "default" in fiction for, like, half a century now at least. Especially in American fiction, where a sort of "limited omniscience" has been preferred for quite some time. I know when I was in school we were expected to treat omniscient narrative like a child treats a hot stove: stay away from it because you probably don't know what you're doing with it. I think it's a dangerous approach to take with stories, personally, especially in sci-fi/fantasy, because it encourages a hyper-literalism from the audience that often causes the thematic and emotional truth of a work of fiction to get lost in the process.
You tend to find that a lot of internet criticism ignores entirely the possibility that the POV is an unreliable narrator to at least some degree, and has their own view and spin on events. For example, Harry Potter is written from the perspective of a teenage boy new to the Wizarding World, and remembering that is important when analysing the books for, for example, feminist perspective - what is there is filtered through the perspective of the teenage boy. You could write the same story from, say, McGonagall's perspective, and get quite a different result. Discovery, to bring us lurching back to topic, has been explicitly from Burnham's perspective for the majority of its storylines, and the effect of this viewpoint is also explicit in some cases, such as the stylised trial sequence. Are we seeing what 'actually happened', or her point of view?
We are in a hyper-literal world now though.
Perhaps it's frowned upon in some litcrit circles, but I think it's still the default mode for most popular fiction. (Except perhaps in the mystery genre, which seems to prefer using a first-person narrator.) At any rate, no less an authority than John Gardner in his seminal Art of Fiction was a big advocate of the omniscient POV.
No, it's not. Rowling very much uses a third-person omniscient POV. She does tend to dip into Harry's subjective viewpoint more than any other, but he's certainly not the only one she does that with.
I'll grant that a few scenes (that one most conspicuously) have had a somewhat "symbolic" quality to them. However, at no point have I thought of Burnham as the "viewpoint character." She may be the main protagonist (for better or worse), but that's not the same thing. Entirely too many scenes happen without her involvement for that to be the case. (And a first-person-limited POV is pretty hard to carry off on screen in general. A few films pull it off — The Sixth Sense, for instance — but it's unusual.)
Yeah, that's what "limited omniscience" means.
Also, no offense, but John Gardner died three years before I was born. The Art of Fiction came out after he died. As good as that book might be, it by definition can't have an opinion on storytelling techniques of the last three decades.
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But it's not what "unreliable narrator" means, which was what the previous post was saying about Harry Potter. (At any rate, the line between "authorial omniscient" and "third-person omniscient" is a very fuzzy one. But either one is distinct from "third-person limited," in which (e.g.) the audience would not be able to know anything beyond Harry Potter's personal thoughts and experiences.)
Anyhoo, didn't mean to turn this into a discussion about the semantics of parsing fictional POVs. My main point was (and remains) that film and TV fiction usually has a very visceral mimetic impact. As such, narrative (and visual!) information established that way is hard for an audience member simply to disregard.
Anyhoo, didn't mean to turn this into a discussion about the semantics of parsing fictional POVs. My main point was (and remains) that film and TV fiction usually has a very visceral mimetic impact. As such, narrative (and visual!) information established that way is hard for an audience member simply to disregard.
Sure, but when someone is offering to give you something your expectations should be based on what THEY think they're giving you, not what you hope you're going to get. So far the producers have been pretty clear that they're talking about those story elements relative to those characters and to the very unique features of Discovery's technology and story elements, namely the Spore Drive, the Klingons, and Burnham. The producers consider those to be the biggest deviations and have pledged that they will be reconciled in due time.
Your response "But what about all the things I consider to be deviations?" is a separate line of questioning.
It’s really insulting. Anyone who actually listens to the word of the people actually making the show are nuts, while those having issues with it are somehow seeing “the truth”. It’s as if a minority of fans know more than anyone else, including the writers.
And, yet, it has been done with Trek before, will be done again, and again.
At some point in time, there needs to be a respect for the audience being intelligent enough to understand that things change and do not require an explanation for everything.
I don't have numbers, if they even exist, but that's not my experience at all. This year I haven't read a single one, and I'm on my fourteenth novel of the year, The Road, also not omniscient POV. In my experience, it's noteworthy for being the exception in modern fiction, which favours third person limited or first person limited.
Nope. With the exception of the three short 'setup' chapters which begin books 1, 4 and 6, Rowling writes from Harry's perspective. What he doesn't know, the reader doesn't know. There's nothing omniscient about it. It's given in this article as the example of note of third person limited.
Come again?
I don't see any difference there.
Is this not the same thread where people are insisting that Discovery MUST be a reboot because their holographic technology is too advanced? The obvious implication: They couldn't have that kind of technology, because we would have known about it!
People have insisted that Spock was the only Vulcan in Starfleet. There couldn't be other Vulcans, because we would have known about it!
People have insisted that the Enterprise was the biggest starship in the fleet. There couldn't have been bigger starships, because we would have known about them!
People have insisted that the Klingon War violates canon. There couldn't have been a Klingon War during the Pike era, because we would have known about it!
People STILL insist that the spore drive renders the entire premise of DS9 and Voyager moot. There couldn't have been a spore drive, because the crew of Voyager surely would have known about it!
New information seems to contradict the old information if you assume the old information is as complete as it could possibly get. The gaps in our knowledge about the 23rd century, however, are rather enormous and there's ALOT of room to fill there. The producers haven't assured us anything except that the new information they're showing us won't actually CONTRADICT what we already know. Beyond that, however, all bets are off.
IIRC, this statement was originally made at one of the ComicCon panels, so it's not hard to guess where they got that impression.
Or if that doesn't work, just look back through the complaints here on this forum. They all have the same basic theme: "Discovery can't be prime because it's too different from what we were expecting!" All of which implies that we knew enough about the 23rd century to know what to expect in the first place.
I think you can only speak for yourself in this case. A fair number of people are indeed complaining about exactly this, some right here in this thread.
Although, you're right, they are definitely missing the point.
And again, you can only speak for yourself as to what you think is and isn't important for the majority of fans. But if anyone has final say over what matters and what doesn't, it would be the people who actually made the show in the first place, not the audience. We can misinterpret what we're seeing and read too much in to a particular choice, but the producers know what those choices mean and why they were made in the first place.
That has not been the basic theme of this thread. You keep trying to make it out to be that, but it just isn't.
Do you really want me to be annoying and quote this post each and every time this happens?
Threads drift. It's ok.
I would enjoy that as well.
I have no trouble believing DSC and TOS are the same universe only ten years apart, just as I have no trouble believing TNG's first season and DS9's sixth are the same universe only ten years apart.
The more Trek changes, the more it stays the same.
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