Everything Discovery has abandoned over the course of this season...

didn't he understand Tyler, when Tyler spoke thlingan hol?
(edit: yes, that was the first time)

 

Yep. He called it "the forgotten tongue".

 

Burns night is soon. If he opens a haggis in the MU, he can probably get a handy species matched Heart, Brain and a new set of courageous Threat Dangly Bits.

 

The whole series on Netflix in the uk seems to be available with full Klingon subtitles, even for the English bits. We also don’t get the big ye olde font I keep seeing in screencasts for the Klingon dialogue. Makes some sense seem like an arthouse film about Swedish death metal fans working in an abattoir while getting ready for a night out.

 

That's quite a list, you clearly have been watching.

To add, they threw away whatever plan L'Rell and Voq had to learn of Discovery's secret. They threw away the male sexual abuse issues. They threw away Lorca just being messed up and Cornwell reeling him back in. They threw away Culber and his relationship being real with Stamets anymore. They threw away any belief that death means anything.

 

The sexual abuse one is a biggie. Even though we knew that was likely to turn out how it did, it’s still pretty...bad. The rage about Seven over in Voyager blazes to this day, and here we have an even more clear cut, no allegory needed, portrayal of this situation, dealing directly with it and not the related issue that Voyager was (repressed memories) and...it’s false. I don’t want to sound like some stereotype acronym that’s flying about, but there is no way in hell they could have done that with say...Tilly...and got away without a twitterstorm from Hell. It annoyed me at the time, because it was blindingly obvious it wasn’t going to be ‘true’. Maybe it was kinda brave to even touch on it the way they did, because that was risky in this day and age too. (I have literally heard people say it is impossible for a man to be raped by a woman, largely on the technicality of the legal definition here)
I don’t know where I would have wanted them to go with this to be honest, maybe it’s one of the areas best left in allegory for something like Trek, and I say that witha heavy heart. Especially after watching The Orville deftly handle several issues at once really well..circumcision and gender equality etc. Maybe it’s something you need the episodic nature to do.

 

I'm surprised I haven't seen much backlash about the sexual abuse angle.

 

I’ll roll the dice again..
We probably won’t. Ash is a male soldier. In geek culture particular, he is expendable and allowed to suffer. There is a reason every sudden violent death of a nameless character in DSC has been a Male, and it’s the same reason Lara Croft will make more press for bad things happening than anyone of a thousand faceless mooks in Call of Duty or Homefront. But hey. That’s the world we live in, and it’s a fiddly political discussion, but one DSC does bring up.

 

I feel they 'used' sexual abuse at first to emasculate a male character. The way Lorca chided L'Rell about humans not even having enough parts to satisfy a Klingon woman. That was cheap. A diversion so people could titter about genitalia, just like the naked Klingon boobs. However the flashbacks Tyler had of L'Rell enjoying herself were putrid in the context that a prisoner was trading off his life to degrade himself to his captor. His post traumatic stress reaction to seeing her again was legitimate in context of that. He even bonded with Michael by opening up to her.

Discovery did not want to bring up such discussion they had their 'out' in the story conception.

 

Yup. None of it was real. Reset.
They can’t avoid Male Kelpian dinner, Dead Lords all in a row, Pop Goes the MU Rebel (all in one episode) it starts getting thematic. Yes, there’s Landry, but she got a name, and like Georgiou, gets an MU return. At least TNG era goldshirts were equal ops, it’s back to sixties redshirt Boys here in DSC. I think TOS had at least one female security officer though.
This doesn’t mean I am champing at the bit for eviscerated females on screen, far from it, I would rather have less evisceration in general. I may have been spoilt by edited versions of Trek in my youth, but the aversion to a family audience still annoys me.
Teaching boys that we are expendable meat bags, marinated in violence, annoys me also.

 

I must admit to not seeing this point of view before! As a female I was noticing those (supposed) original deaths of Georgiou and even Landry. I was even somewhat lamenting that the Shenzhou (captained by a woman with a woman next in command) was not going to be more than a prop. For some reason I thought before Discovery (the show) was being marketed we were gearing ourselves up for something new in concept. TWO Starships with two active crews. Another abandoned or misled feature of 'Discovery'. I still had hopes of Cornwell being made a bigger role.

Anyway your comment "teaching boys that we are expendable meat bags, marinated in violence, annoys me also." There is an element of that. I need to think more on it.

 

Teaching boys?

 

While the black badges have indeed vanished mysteriously, the floating water was explained as a byproduct of the spore drive being used for small jumps pre-Tardigrade.

 

- The Klingon War. They did absolutely nothing with this and it went absolutely nowhere.
- Ash/Tyler. 10 episodes of building and building to a reveal... then to be solved in literally under 5 minutes. I assume this arc meant a lot more in the original draft of the series, but it was completely and utterly pointless in the Discovery we got, if there is ever a fan edit supercut of this show, this should be the first thing cut.
- The show not focusing on the Bridge crew, this lasted not even a single episode.
- Everything about Tilly was basically changed. She is 100% not the same character as the character we got in the first few episodes. You can not tell me, that the Tilly we see in Episode 11, is just "character growth" of the character in Episode 3 and 4. One is blatantly high functioning autistic, The Tilly we see Episode 7 onwards is very socially outgoing, not even that dorky and is even a slutty sorority girl in episode 7. She's actually just the most normal person on the show at this point.

I agree they also did nothing with Burnham's Vulcan heritage. That being said, she just came off as a 15 year old spoiled brat in the first few episodes of Discovery so they probably changed it because it just wasn't working.

 

^^^
And it is a choice that should be applauded because between the non-understandable made up language and the makeup prosthetics; those poor Klingon actors were seriously hampered in trying to act out anything as I'm sure they were more concentrating on getting the syntax/pronunciation correct then actually being able to try and bring any nuance or real acting to the those scenes.

Like I said in other threads, I'll give the Creators props for trying this experiment; but I think even they realized said experiment failed in what they were hoping to bring across to the audience with those 'native Klingon' scenes; so they stopped it and returned to the old Trek trope of aliens speaking English so EVERYONE knows what's being said.

Actors work better when they can UNDERSTAND THEMSELVES what they're actually saying in a scene,

 

I mean, that is literally how that scene was coded since it was literally ripped 1:1 from shitty early 2000s frat party movies. They even did the lame "takes red cup from guy, he moves into kiss and then she pushes off his face because she's too good".
God I hated that Party scene, so goddamn much.

 

That would require Burnham actually being flawed and not a borderline Mary Sue, but alas, the Torchbearer attacked first and she accidentally killed him, she was smarter than everyone and tried to save the ship but everyone misunderstood and she was punished for it, which put her into a science officer role on essentially a premier top secret ship of the Federation in which everything revolves around her and how awesome she is, also everyone hated her, but when they all saw how much better she was than them, everyone came to fawn over her.

I suspect the Pocahontas effect is in play with Burnham, they played up the "diversity, first black lead" shit they are playing her too safe and refuse to actually give her real flaws or a character arc. Burnhams problem isn't that she was ever wrong, it's that she was right and people were too dumb to actually listen to how right she was. What's the character arc? That everyone comes to realise Burnham is basically perfect and all apologise for their sins against her?

 

I think this series has too much gratuitous violence, but it can go too far the other way. On VOY and especially the first few seasons of ENT, virtually no one ever died. Whenever the ship got into contact, they always just disabled weapons and engines, and left them stranded.

It's called flirting, not being a slut.

I wouldn't be surprised if to a certain extent it was an ad-lib by Mary Wiseman. It looks like the director of that episode had more genre experience than most - even directing an episode of Enterprise in the past.

The worst thing about that scene was how...contemporary...it was. One thing Trek has always been bad at doing is conveying that the future is a somewhat culturally alien place, and here people are dancing to (relatively) contemporary music and drinking from red cups. If you don't want to pay someone to come up with "future music" at least use a weird Animal Collective track or something.

 

One hasn't partied until they partied 25th Century style.