TOS is always my go to. DSC usually sits right between DS9 and TNG for rewatching depending on the episode.
I don't understand the hate Disco gets / still gets.
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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Don't really care. I've read enough literature to know that protagonists are not always right.
Yeah, sure, when looking into what the moral of a story is... ignoring the story itself, ignoring what the creatives behind the story say, just making up your own moral and replying to everyone that want to stay with the facts with "Supposedly the Trek audience is smarter than that." instead of giving arguments.
Well and I thought
Supposedly the Trek audience is smarter than that.
Others have given arguments. I don't see the issue as you do.
What arguments would I give? Reading the initial post leads me to the conclusion that your view of the scene and mine are so completely at odds that I don't see a reconciliation. The idea that Seven murder Ichab as some sort of abelist commentary is a stretch to my view. That Seven goes "amok" and kills a known criminal in a lawless section of space strikes as me pretty much in line with the vigilante style justice done a couple of times in Trek, and in line with other revenge style stories. That Seven suffers no consequences doesn't make her actions any more laudable. It does make it more understandable, which I believe was more the showrunner's purpose, than praising her actions.
None of which is anti-Trek because all of it has been done in Trek before.
Uhuh. So murder by a main character which is "called out" is fine (notwithstanding that there are no practical consequences whatsoever), yet murder which is not "called out" is "morally bankrupt", "appalling and betrays everything Star Trek stands for.".
Presumably that also extends to characters calling out themselves, so Sisko being an accessory to two murders and being indirectly responsible for the deaths of countless Romulans who he falsely lured into a war is consistent with Trek's values because he hints at some moral concern, even though he decides he "can live with it" and it's never mentioned again. One wonders where his use of chemical weapons to displace civilians (a war crime even these days, incidentally) fits into that, given he laughs it off.
What a bizarre moral system it would be to find that acceptable, and Seven's actions not.
Mercifully putting a child and loved one out of their misery when they're mortally wounded is about as much "murder" as punching an opponent in the face in a boxing match is assault and battery. The less that concept is taken seriously the better.
Yet here we are. And somehow it's discriminatory too?So, Seven murdered Icheb, now?
As Zoe would say, “that was a piece of mercy.”
I can’t imagine any other reading of that heartbreaking scene…
See, I guess the difference between the way YOU watch stories and the way I watch stories is I don't need it to have a "moral," I need it to be entertaining. It is not one of Aesop's fables, it is space opera. I don't need my protagonists to be inherently good. Mal kicked a captive into an engine in episode 1 (or 2, depending on your preferred numbering) of Firefly just to prove a point. But he was the protagonist of the story and, dare I say, a big damn hero. I didn't have to AGREE with Seven's actions, I had to understand them. And as she was a grieving parental figure, if you don't think a grieving mom wants to hunt down every person who were responsible for their child's death, I would say you don't understand humanity very well.
Remember for all the hate Voyager gets, it was the most watched Trek back in the Netflix days and "Endgame" was the most viewed episode.
It's a good thing that's not what happened in "Stardust City Rag."
Nope. The full context of the scene made it very clear that Icheb was fatally wounded and in enormous suffering; he had no hope whatsoever of survival, and every moment of remaining consciousness was pure agony. Seven and Icheb both recognized these facts, and Icheb consented to Seven ending his life to relieve his suffering.
Furthermore, consensual killing is very clearly legal in the Federation, since Federation law allows for both the Vulcan kal-if-fee and the Andorian Ushaan duels to the death.
"Stardust City Rag" depicts Seven's killing of Bjayzl is depicted as a morally ambiguous act, not necessarily a morally justified or unjustified act.
The episode does make a very strong argument that Seven's actions represent the consequence of a culture that lacks a meaningful rule of law. But it doesn't condemn or condone.
I'm sorry, but this is just false. The episode is essentially arguing that good people can be driven to do cold-blooded things when forced to operate in the absence of the rule of law; it is not arguing that murder is good.
The very second episode of Star Trek was all about how Kirk killing his best friend in retaliation for murders Gary Mitchel committed while mentally ill.
And in S2 we had Seven use non-lethal force against space pirates and in the rest of S2 was her killing literal Space Nazis in their hundreds that were worse than the Cardassians and improvised Borg drones that perhaps had their frontal lobes fried, and all in complete self-defence (and in the defence of others, including a lover).
In the context of the scene, it very clearly does.
I'm struggling to find any other way to interpret that scene. They couldn't have been any more plain short of having Seven look directly into the camera to explain her actions.
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From this thread I learned that it's okay to kill someone as long as you explain very slowly why you are doing it and that you feel visibly bad about it later...
Cool! I'm going out for a walk!
Cool! I'm going out for a walk!
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there is this:
https://collider.com/star-trek-discovery-most-watched-original-series-paramount-plus/
what I've been suspecting for a little awhile. Maybe SNW will dethrone it, or some other show altogether, but what as of a few months ago, Disco was the most watched show on Paramount+. What Discovery has managed to do, I suspect, is grow its own distinct fanbase. They may be more casual viewers than trekkies who've been around longer, and of course Paramount isn't beholden to tell anyone what their viewership is. Still: it's worth at least 5 seasons. And from the kind of backlash that Disco has received attached to anti-feminist, racist, and homophobic sentiments, on Facebook and YouTube, I suspect a good deal of this hypothetical new fandom avoids the usual places and the usual faces, even here. To be blunt, why would they want to be associated with "us?"
If the whole point of Discovery was to kickstart the streaming service, lead into a new era of multiple trek shows, even if it was running in the red and lost its initial viewership, then it would have been axed by now. But it hasn't been. Discovery could have been dropped in lieu of that Section 31 show. They already had actors and sets, for that matter. But they didn't. I haven't been fond of the last season of Discovery but it seems to have had enough of a viewership that serious money is going to continue to be put into it. That can only mean that they are getting serious money out of it.
Very much agreed. I don't need to get my morality from television shows, and I sure as heck don't need to "agree" with the actions of the protagonists in order to like, appreciate or be entertained by the show.
If DSC were not popular and driving the metrics P+ wants to see, they could have done away with it a long time ago. It's a very expensive show to produce (8-9M per episode?)....and there's absolutely no reason to continue making it if it's not producing. They're not going to throw that kind of money into a product that people don't like, don't watch, and don't care about.
People can throw all the charts and "audience reaction scores" from various outlets in my face all they want. It doesn't tell the story...which is no matter what, P+ is pleased with it's performance and will continue to make the show until it doesn't make financial sense any more.
Frankly, DSC has already exceeded my expectations, as I figured a successful run would be 3-5 seasons max in this day and age, and on a new untested streaming platform. Anything we get now is total cake as far as I'm concerned.
But, we all know...it if gets 6 seasons and isn't renewed for 7, thousands of "fans" will be waving annoying flags in our faces, telling us how the show "failed."
Get out of here with that crap....
And to add to that, while other networks were slowing down production through COVID (long delays to Stranger Things, The Rings of Power, etc), Paramount did not miss a beat and kept producing Disco at more or less the same pace. The conspiracy theorists don't have an answer to that, either. If anything, churning out Disco and the other series at this pace with all the precautions and changes that it required to filming probably did affect the quality of the show. We'll never know. But, again, if Disco was just the loss-leader for some attempt to force people to watch Discovery, they did not need to throw money in the furnace at a breakneck speed. They clearly have a product that people are buying, and are trying to meet the demand no matter what.
DSCO found enough fans and audience to run for many seasons now, just not all of the TNG, etc, era fans (especially the more shrill ones who want to keep visual entertainment in a weird early 1980s to early 2000s time bubble).
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I don't think there's anything from DISCO to hate, it is mindless entertainment and doesn't aim to be anything but. The characters are what they are and the special effects is top notch, as a series which stand on its own - without TOS baggage - this series had triumphed. Each season was a gradual progression for them to earn a promotion to cinemas... which most DISCO fans doesn't want... which still boggles my mind!
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