I dunno - there have been several examples of Starfleet noticing things and declining to tell the public for one reason or another. Or, given how little people knew about it, they could had a huge but quiet project going on to learn more about this, and it would show up at most as a benign footnote in a galactic missive somewhere until one of them short-circuited one of the fleet's finest.
I have no problem with this. The part I sort of worry about is that the folks of
Discovery apparently never saw these red things. Does this tell us something about the nature and visibility of the phenomena?
- The not-VISOR isn't the first time we've seen wearables in a transporter room - but is it a nod to TNG, the JJ movies, or both? It's not like the transporter operator NEEDS the gear as we've seen it operated multiple times without one, but OTOH they seemed necessary to the JJ-Prise.
I'd chalk up most implants and wearables as prosthetics for war invalids. Then again, Georgiou's Tactical wore an apparent VR helmet - perhaps as of the late 2250s and on, this is outdated tech that some old-fashioned people can't do without for psychological reasons?
- Looking at the transporter room in the secondary hull again, it seems clear that Burnham and Saru look the long way from the front of that deck to the aft of the interconnecting dorsal, met up with Pike and his contingent, and then led them BACK to the lift before the crazy hamster tube sequence.
And they changed floors at least once, because Burnham and Saru took a right turn after walking alongside the port wall of the neck and didn't end up breathing vacuum.
Possibly primary hull transporters were reserved for dealing with Pike's casualties or something? (The long camera run obviously wouldn't have anything to do with there now being this expansive set with all-new nooks and crannies.)
- Between this and the shuttlebay sequence later on, I'm starting to wonder if Discovery was actually still carrying out repairs from the last few operations, which took out their primary transporter room and the shuttlebay (the latter of which MAY have been modified to launch the spore drive jumpstart missiles and needed to be put back in place again). Tilly being put in charge of resourcing and reallocating things after the war seems to suggest a lot of ongoing operations to upgrade, repair, or reconfigure what they got.
Good point - although I suspect flexibility is one of the key assets of the ship, and connected to the interiors being an "unfinished" cave full of roller coaster turbotracks. And yes, I'm still riding the hobbyhorse of the
Crossfields being former shuttlecarriers with interior space to burn...
- Haha, it's been pointed out that commander Nhan was a Barzan! Cute reference for a one-off species (and a non-Federation one at that, as of the 2360s). Interesting world building there.
Also, a soulmate for Saru, as Barzans still lacked warp a century later; Nhan probably can't go back home, either, if the same PD concerns apply.
Or is this "We have no crewed spaceflight, we depend on others" business one of those "We bombed ourselves back to stone age after a glorious Golden Age of interstellar contact" things?
- Pike was apparently awarded the Carrington Award that Dr. Bashir would later NOT be awarded for advances in the field of medicine. I really don't see him as that sort of person, so maybe he partnered with someone on this? What would Boyce say? Maybe he got infected with something that got named after him?
The rules regarding the award may have changed, of course. ITRW, it's been 100 years since the death of Mary Edwards Walker, the only female recipient of the Medal of Honor - not for valor in combat as the requirements today go, but for practicing medicine beyond the requirements of her contract.
Perhaps Carrington left a wealthy foundation that has been forced to scale down to medicine after so many heroic feats of more general nature tapped into the funds?
There's also that Cardassian award with the word Legate prominent in its name. But not the word Cardassia, so we can plead mere convergent evolution of terminology.
- Stamets' going over old letters while on duty - that's one thing. He's finally found time to mourn, I understand. But let's talk about the actual video - what is he looking at? It's a two-dimensional image of Culber, but he's also in a three-dimensional replication of another room (it's not specific, but could be sickbay or their quarters or wherever Culber was at the time). All of this is apparently being fed directly to Stamets' brain through the not-USS Equinox synaptic stimulator. I know we're not supposed to think THAT deeply into it (it's almost certainly a writer's visual cue to say THIS IS A MEMORY), but if this were a holorecording, why wouldn't the whole thing be in 3D? We know that other recordings are in 3D, and even live conversations across space aren't necessarily limited to flat panel.
I'm pretty sure we're seeing a third-person view of Stamets reminiscing on the day he watched a 2D message from Culber. I mean, there's a whole range of options there already: 2D as in Lorca's Ready Room, semi-3D as between Stamets and Straal at the Engineering console, full 3D in low or moderate quality.
- The engineering set has been expanded without anyone being told, recalling how the TOS and TNG sets got make overs by their sophmore seasons. I thought they were going to replace the shroomroom door with a new wall, but it's still there; instead a formerly blank wall next to the spore drive chamber is now home to a workspace beyond, visible through glass doors. In all of Trek only one engineering set has been properly symmetrical (VOY), so this is just furthering the original trend IMO.
Well, it
is off to port - this is where the camera emerges when pulling back and up from Lorca and Burnham in "Context" after the spore demonstration. There might be another one to starboard.
And yanking out the mushroom conservatory would make it possible to "restore" the workspace we now see.
- When Pike asks for his roll call, he misses, and apparently cares not for, the minimum of three extras also on the bridge. This is a mistake; at least one of them can teleport, as she's seen walking from port to starboard behind him twice during the cute sequence.
A great way to avoid attention, this...
...Perhaps these people have learned the lesson on never volunteering, but not all of them can avoid the glare of Pike's stare?
- Wherever those nifty spinny cameras are, it's not the saucer's ventral dome. I wonder where it is - because wherever it is, it's not about to get much coverage of the hull from there. Maybe there are several scattered around the hull that would work in concert to get a 3D image of the hull? Maybe those little spheres can pop off for remote use?
I'm all for multiple clusters, and for these being "telescopic", that is, on telescopic stalks.
- The EXTREMELY Gerry Anderson-esque launch sequence of the landing pods raises more questions than answers for me. Aside from looking really cool, is there any reason the pods couldn't simply be released from the shuttlebay? They emerged launching aft between the nacelles, so it's not like they'd be going in any other direction. There's also no specific port on the Discovery model to match where they popped out from. And is there no other way for people to board the pods than through the shuttlebay elevator?
Again I'd argue the ship is an extremely flexible work in progress. There's this launching system for generic things beneath the shuttlebay floor, a bit like the chutes flanking Kirk's shuttlebay that can fire Ion Pods but also probes and maintenance hardsuits and garbage cans and whatnot. It can be loaded by using the common elevator-turntable, and many of the ordnance types absolutely require the acceleration tubes even if the pods do not. But this is a good place to store the pods, as the shuttlebay proper is chock full of supplies and gear already, no doubt due to the flexibility thing again - due to akl the ongoing work, there's no proper route for transfer of consumables, so the bay has to do triple or quintuple duty like no other bay in Starfleet.
- The landing pod party have the same design of suit, but different color, even though Burnham and Connolly are from the same Sciences department AND Nhan is in Red instead of the Disco-standard Bronze for her department. Did the Enterprise crew beam over their gear separately before they left?
One might assume spacesuits to be the one thing that would be brought along, in addition to a compact selection of personal effects and the like. I agree they'd be custom-fitted even when less critical wear such as Burnham's uniform can be fabricated at the push of a button.
But it's also possible that Starfleet changes uniforms by issuing its personnel a new pattern to their personal fabricator cards. So when Burnham inserts hers, she gets the old-fashioned white gear, but when Pike's folks use theirs, they get the newest fashion.
- As the pod party crew enters the shuttlebay, someone announces for all non-essential personel to clear out of the bay. Clearly everyone in there IS essential, because NO ONE LEAVES through the big primary door that everyone uses!
Then again, the place must be full of other doors, considering. Where do all those crates and barrels go? The extra shuttles disappear to their hangars effortlessly enough, so mere people should have it easy there.
- Is there ANY need for the turntable to actually turn as it descends?
If the thing normally brings shuttlecraft down two levels to their compact little hangar, it may be programmed to position them correctly for that. I mean, no, I don't want to believe in a corkscrew mechanism here!
- So when are there particular windows for Burnham to have been a test pilot for the landing pods? Most logically this was done at some point during her time on Discovery under Lorca, before their trip to the upside down. But conceivably it could have been done at some other point in her career. the Shenzhou could have had them aboard, or it could even have been during a stint she did elsewhere... I've always been skeptical that she'd spend her entire pre-DSC Starfleet career on one ship, without training or postings elsewhere, despite credits with the VSA or wherever.
I'd be glad to accept the pods as an old thing, from years back. It's only Burnham's non-royal "we" that bothers me there. The "we" who built these pods for that mission aren't the three people Burnham is talking to, obviously. Is she referring to her new
Discovery family or the old sisterhood of the Flight Test Range?
- The big wreckage room of the Hiawatha (which cleverly covers up the concrete floor and walls of the disused-factory location much better than spaceships of some other sci-fi shows I won't mention) includes those funny bent lighting props that we first (?) saw as part of Discovery's not-holodeck. They were also seen in the mirror-universe, among places, but unless this big wrecked room were a holodeck I'm wondering if they're simply lamps in-universe.
Or lamps and more. Just today I read an article of coding information into the light from LEDs used primarily for illumination of rooms - a wi-fi of sorts. Every fancy lamp in Star Trek might be a display device secondarily, a data and power virtu-socket tertiarily, and so forth.
- The crate that Reno keeps her kids in abbreviates her ship's name to "HIA". Have we seen a similar thing on stuff for Discovery, aside from those very marketable T-shirts from last year, and I guess the shuttles?
I don't recall any TLA crates, but I gather they will be a thing from now on. And then we can re-ignite the TLA wars: will they say DIS or DSC, or perhaps abbreviate "Starfleet To Discovery"?
- Burnham asks Reno to see if she could get the other transporter console working as she worked on the first. How would they both be used in regular operations? This is the first time we've really seen a dual console setup, even though at least on TOS their one console is usually manned by two people (though ENT, and the TNG era shows nominally have one).
Might be handy for moving of patients - perhaps they "risk" intraship beaming like so many latter-day medics, and there are separate consoles for inbound and intraship?
- I swear to God, Tilly's asteroid capture device transforms open with a hint of the 80s Transformers cartoon SFX cue.
I wouldn't wonder a bit!
Timo Saloniemi
