TOS had the advantage of not being an ensemble show. There were the three lead actors and a gaggle of bit and day players filling recurring supporting roles.
Is the guest cast of the show too small?
- Thread starter eschaton
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TOS had the advantage of not being an ensemble show. There were the three lead actors and a gaggle of bit and day players filling recurring supporting roles.
What episodes exactly are you talking about?
But why would you want more of the same from DSC? One of the nice things about the series is it isn't like other Trek series before it. It's different.
Because if I like something I want more of the same. And the question for you is why would you want something different? There are many different SF shows, you can pick one.
For example, I love Stargate, it's completely different from Star Trek and I love it. But if I want to watch Stargate or Star Trek I want to have a show that I first fell in love with, not something completely different.
Stargate SG-1and Stargate Atlantis were good. Stargate Universe was crap. Too different from the other two shows. Disco is nowhere near those levels of boring-bad.
I didn't even watch Stargate Universe. I was only thinking about SG1 and Atlantis.
Running down the list, The Menagerie, The Enemy Within, Court Martial, The Ultimate Computer, The Enterprise Incident, Turnabout Intruder, The Big Goodbye, 11001001, Too Short A Session, Coming of Age, Heart of Glory, Elementary Dear Data, A Matter of Honour, The Measure of a Man, The Emissary, Peak Performance, The Bonding, The Defector, Deja Q, Subs of the Father (and all the follow-up Klingon episodes ad infinitum), Sarek, Menage a Troi, Family..... All involve no exploration, discovery, strange new worlds, new civilisations.
Skipping ahead because I'm getting bored, DS9 is brimming with these episodes - I'd argue the majority of their episodes, especially in the second half of the series, don't fit the explorer/discovery vibe. Even Voyager and Enterprise who had premises which would lend themselves to weekly exploration had plenty of episodes that were internally focused, or based on interaction with established aliens.
In all those we had new characters, new planets, new ships, starbases... What I wanted to say was that majority of episodes in Discovery don't introduce any new characters, any new ships, planets... It feels very claustrofobic.
I agree it's not discovering anything that hasn't been done in other Trek but was done more entertainingly. I think with the new aliens sometimes taking the form of non-corporal life, say the Pahvans, it does save on guest stars!
If those are the standards, Discovery is doing the same.
Pilot - everything is new
CifK - nearly everything is new again
Butchers - tardigrade
Choose your pain - Tyler, Mudd, Klingon ship, more tardigrade fun
Lethe - Cornwell gets her proper introduction, new Vulcan ship, new major Sarek backstory
Magic - time looping, time crystals, space whale
Latin - new planet, new species, new ship
Forest - mostly old stuff, but ends with a mystery.
I think there's a bit of a double standard at work if a new character or new mystery is enough to qualify an episode as exploration/discovery.
There's really two options here -
1. We are quite discerning about what constitutes finding new things, in which case about three Discovery episodes qualify, roughly the same rate as TNG and higher than DS9. Or...
2. We are liberal about what constitutes finding new stuff, in which case Discovery qualifies just as much as the episodes I listed.
No way to separate out Discovery without applying a double standard.
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Well, OK, but for some reason it wasn't memorable to me. That is just my opinion.
I like seeing the bridge crew every week. I'm sure we'll get some more info on them in the back half of the season.
Episode 1/2: some desert planet\Accretion Disk of binary star system
Episode 3: bottle episode unless you count the nebula or the wreck of the Glenn
Episode 4: Corvan II
Episode 5: Klingon prison ship in Klingon territory
Episode 6: Vulcan (within Sarek's mind)
Episode 7: bottle episode
Episode 8: Pahvo
Episode 9: Pahvo and somewhere else
I guess they went somewhere. And while they don't have a LOT of interior shots, did you see all the episodes? They've been doing more eye candy of Discovery as the season went on, especially at the end.
It's namesaked after OV-103 Discovery, another science vessel that did not discover anything on its own but led to a various scientific discoveries.
And so far they have discovered a different method of Travel, nodes to alternate realities, a couple of new species, one sentient, the other possibly so, Mudd's time crystals, and a space whale. The series IS set during a war so at the moment the science vessle is re-purposed for that. You may have missed it. OV-103 lofted a few spysats, in its day.
Berman era Trek relied a bit too heavily on space anomalies. Hell, even the year long Xindi storyline ended up utilizing space anomalies in a major way.
Tropes made the point that most Trek episodes break down into one of three broad areas:
1. Planet of Hats - We meet some alien race which is like us, except not in one very particular way, where they are all alike.
2. Negative Space Wedgie - The good old "anomaly of the week."
3. Monster of the Week - Self-evident what this is. Sometimes what looks like a monster really isn't (e.g., the Horta) and sometimes a race can be a monster (first few instances of the Borg).
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