• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Spoilers DSC: Somewhere to Belong by Dayton Ward Review Thread

Rate Somewhere to Belong

  • Outstanding

    Votes: 4 40.0%
  • Above Average

    Votes: 3 30.0%
  • Average

    Votes: 2 20.0%
  • Below Average

    Votes: 1 10.0%
  • Poor

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    10
He was, according to SNW. Specifically in the episode The Elysian Kingdom he's the author of the book M'Benga reads to his daughter.
Hmm. And of course, Benny Russell (and that entire episode) take place well before Kirk and Kor cooperate to free themselves from a similarly-named pocket-universe in the Delta Triangle.

But getting back to Somewhere to Belong, I'm now just past halfway through, and sure enough, there is some bad juju going on.

Spock should've worn that helmed in SNW "Charades".
No SNW spoilers here, please! Some of us wait for the DVD set.
 
Just finished it. Almost an "outstanding."

As to breaking the 8th wall and having a television series exist as an in-universe television series within itself, Emergency! came damn close: in one episode, they did a crossover with Adam-12, while in another, Gage was obsessed with finding out how an episode of Adam-12 had ended. Not quite as blatant as Bart and Jim going into a theatre to see Blazing Saddles or Dark Helmet watching a videotape of Spaceballs, but that only happens in Mel Brooks comedies.
 
As to breaking the 8th wall and having a television series exist as an in-universe television series within itself, Emergency! came damn close: in one episode, they did a crossover with Adam-12, while in another, Gage was obsessed with finding out how an episode of Adam-12 had ended. Not quite as blatant as Bart and Jim going into a theatre to see Blazing Saddles or Dark Helmet watching a videotape of Spaceballs, but that only happens in Mel Brooks comedies.

In comedies, but not only Mel Brooks ones -- see The Muppet Movie or She-Hulk, for example.

Then there was Batman and The Green Hornet referencing each other as TV shows their respective characters watched before having the Green Hornet and Kato show up as real people in Batman.

There's the episode of Power Rangers Dino Thunder, a localized adaptation of the Japanese Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger, where the Dino Thunder Rangers watched a dubbed episode of Abaranger that was supposedly a Japanese fictionalization of their own real-life adventures.

Marvel Comics since the '60s have established that Marvel Comics and its creators exist in the Marvel Universe, as biographers of the superheroes' real experiences. Comics like The Fantastic Four are presumably the same in-universe as in real life, although in the case of characters with secret identities, the in-universe comics invent imaginary identities for them.
 
An available species in the game Jurassic World Evolution 2 is the Crichtonsaurus. In the "real world" (do we have a better word for our universe?), it was named Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. In the game, Dr. Henry Wu mentions he read 'Crichton's book' and liked it.

There's, IIRC, also Star Trek stories that establish the TOS crew travelled into the past and told Roddenberry, Shatner and co everything.
 
There's, IIRC, also Star Trek stories that establish the TOS crew travelled into the past and told Roddenberry, Shatner and co everything.

There's Roddenberry's conceit in the preface of the ST:TMP novelization that TOS was an "inaccurately larger-than-life" 23rd-century dramatization of Kirk's adventures, and that the changes in TMP are due to it being a more authentic dramatization due to having Admiral Kirk's oversight this time around. I built on that in The Higher Frontier by establishing that there are in-universe shows based on the mission logs of famous Starfleet ships including the Enterprise.
 

Which is the subject of my current review series on Patreon, as linked in my signature. And the TV series version was the best science-fiction-as-allegory show since Star Trek, with two lead actors who later appeared in Trek, Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint. The eight tie-in novels from Pocket had an editor and a number of authors in common with the Trek novels, including Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Peter David, K.W. Jeter, and L.A. Graf.
 
After bouncing hard off of Discovery's second season finale, I decided I should catch up with it since SFA is coming out. As with when I did the first two seasons of PIC, I decided to slot in Somewhere to Belong where it goes chronologically, and started reading it after finishing "That Hope is You, Part II" (as an aside, unlike when I was watching DSC season 2, most of the things that would've annoyed me about season 3, such as playing games with episode titles like the premiere, the finale, and "Unification, Part III" didn't wear on me that badly, probably because I already knew they were coming; I still thought mirror-Georgiou sucked the life out of the show whenever she appeared, and I'm mildly amused that the second she was gone, all the characters started talking about how important regular-Georgiou was to them again, after she'd seemingly been forgotten).

There were a few things that surprised me, things I thought would occur in season 3, or at least would merit a depiction as they were changes from the season 2 status quo, that were treated as fait accompli (Zora getting a name, Tilly making lieutenant, Rhys being XO). Having since watched the first two episodes of season 3, I'm surprised by how they were dropped in so quietly in the show; they all seem like things that the show would make a meal from the process those transitions. Another thing that would've seemed odder if I hadn't read StB was that they played off the season 2 finale leaving Stamets super-pissed at Burnham about putting him off the ship to keep him away from the Emerald Chain with a single joke, and actually had him more annoyed with Book about how that whole thing had gone down, so I think it was definitely a good idea that I read the novel where it went chronologically, since Dayton resolved that abandoned plot thread (to the point where I was a little surprised when I was reading it that Stamets ended up reconciling himself to Burnham doing what she thought was necessary no matter who she had to step on, since I'd expected that to be something that would happen on-screen and worried I'd see that conflict resolved twice).

I also made a note about them watching Galaxy Quest for movie night, but that seems to have been a primary topic of discussion here (Alien Nation was a comparatively deep cut, I'm not sure how many people remember that one).

Just because I was talking about it recently in another thread and wondering if it was still in the Trek style-guide, I did notice that "Federation Starship Discovery" was italicized and capitalized in the trademark-protecting manner.

I liked visiting a Yorktown-style station, and the suggestion that the Federation built some in the Prime Universe somewhere, at some point between ten years before TOS and the Burn. I caught a reference to Su'Kal as being "much younger" than Saru, which I don't think is actually true. While he was certainly childlike because of his circumstances, he'd have to have been well over a hundred (and the actor who played him was about 70). I guess Kelpians age slowly (makes sense, Saru must have been 40 or older before he went through space-puberty and lost his chronic anxiety), though he'd still almost certainly be physically older than Saru (I guess we don't actually know how old Saru was when Georgiou found him), if not socially. I liked the concept that the thing that makes the spore drive instantaneous is that the mycelial plane is reacting against a foreign body and ejecting the ship as quickly as possible.

Overall, beyond the stray observations, I enjoyed a standalone, non-quest-based, dare I say "episodic" DSC story (something I also enjoyed about Dead Endless), and I thought Dayton's handle on the characters' voices was remarkably solid.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top