Mass Effect is awesome. The more Star Trek tries to emulate it, the better.
Spoilers Missed opportunities in DSC?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
No thanks.
No, she is a human, taken in by a Vulcan and his human wife. She still remembers her birth parents. She was not shamed for showing emotions. She tried to emulate Vulcans sure, because she saw the value of adhering to logic, but it's not like she went through the Kolinahr and purged herself of emotions.
And in any case, hair does not make the person. Just because she wore a Vulcan style hair cut doesn't mean she IS Vulcan. She just happened to adhere to Vulcan fashion because she still has a connection to that culture.
This is nine/ten years before the original series. Fashion trends change very fast. Have you watched something from the early 2000s recently, saw somebody's clothes or hair, and thought that no one wears clothes/hair like that anymore?
No one else commented upon this, but considering Tuvok had kinky hair, it's apparently completely normal for Vulcans to have non-straight hair and to wear it that way. Yes, it's true that his wife, T'Pel, had straight hair, but that might have just been because she was from a different part of Vulcan (female Vulcans, T'Pol excluded, don't seem to care much what they look like).
The hair doesn't make the Vulcan. Spock - a half-human hybrid - wore a traditional Vulcan hairstyle most of his life. Sybok - a full-blooded Vulcan - wore a shaggy, stringy hairstyle that bore little resemblance to other Vulcan hair we've seen in canon with but a couple of exceptions. If the hair makes a Vulcan more Vulcan then Spock should be a lot more Vulcan than his half-brother.
I like the Lorca point of view idea but I also think they could've expanded that to other characters where their realisation was only touched upon. I know Discovery is not a social commentary but I wonder how Cornwell really felt having had sex, (what would you call it), with someone using false pretences? I also felt Discovery missed the opportunity to validate the whole male/prisoner abuse story.
I personally would have preferred Michael to have been sent to prison for at least a year more. Discovery has glossed over consequence of action. She does something wrong and the answer is to cancel it out by making her a hero.
(I think there is an opportunity to give Tilly advancement too and in the process transfer her to another ship... er promotion
)
I personally would have preferred Michael to have been sent to prison for at least a year more. Discovery has glossed over consequence of action. She does something wrong and the answer is to cancel it out by making her a hero.
(I think there is an opportunity to give Tilly advancement too and in the process transfer her to another ship... er promotion
)
I think Cornwell treating Lorca's fortune cookies to a phaser set on kill give some us some indication as to how she felt!
Eh. Let's agree to disagree. I think Halo is incredible but the last thing I want to see in Star Trek are a bunch of dropships, armored human soldiers and floating holograms and avatars that regularly talk to the characters. The more we video gameify our films and TV shows the more cans of worms that will open just because some people want more and more cool effects and weapons.
I don't know that "gameify" is really what's going on with that. My reaction to Mass Effect and to a lesser extent "Halo" comes to three things:
1) A seemingly better appreciation for the implications of some of those futuristic technologies that Star Trek has never really demonstrated. Body armor for ground teams, plus personal forcefields, and the fact that state-issued weapons and equipment generally under-perform compared to what you can buy at a premium from specialist merchants and/or the black market.
2) A FAR better appreciation of the role of the professional military in national defense and foreign policy AND the need for professional soldiers to that very fine line between being both highly effective killers and the appointed representatives of the State abroad (which is the main reason I continue to be annoyed with Starfleet not being a straight up military organization).
3) Aliens being alien in ways, ironically, make it somewhat easier to humanize them.
I'm not saying the LOOK of Mass Effect or Halo is ideal for Star Trek, but one thing I greatly appreciated in the Kelvin films is the tendency to depict starships as having very large complements of shuttlecraft. The implication is pretty clear that actually exploring an uncharted planet would be MASSIVE undertaking, logistically similar to launching an all-out invasion of an entire continent. You would probably have to land shuttles to hundreds of different sites for extended duration missions -- several days, at the very least -- to catalog wildlife, examine their lifecycles and behavior in detail, collect samples of planets and animals, and collect core/soil/water samples for lab analysis which, whether in the shuttle or back on the ship, is going to take a certain amount of time. All of these are things that would get a lot easier with some kind of AI, which Star Trek consistently fails to imagine as anything more sophisticated than a voice interface.
On the other hand, Star Trek had already crossed a critical mass of gameification when they started quoting deflector shield strengths (and hull integrity, for that matter) in terms of percentages, as if the ship has a finite number of hit points that will cause the whole thing to explode if it runs out.
tl;dr: Videogame storylines and fictional worlds are getting more and more sophisticated and better fleshed out while Star Trek, for the most part, isn't. I mainly just wish that writers and producers would stop taking narrative shortcuts and really think more deeply about how their futuristic setting would actually work instead of just taking as a given that it does.
Understand that I'm a fan that rates DSC's first season at about 7.5/10 (for context, that's my second-highest S1 rating for any series within the franchise)...so nothing that I'm about to say is out of spite or to be considered anything but well-meaning constructive criticism.
I think the biggest "missed opportunity" in DSC was "scope vs. time" quite frankly.
What do I mean by that?
The story arc that was conceived was far too complicated and had far too much potential for richness and depth to be wrapped up effectively in 15 episodes. Having all of these major elements woven into S1:
...it was just too much in too short a time. Hell, you could have done an entire 15 episode season on just the Klingon War and the state that the separate Klingon houses find themselves in. No MU stuff...no "Lorca is teh bad!!1!" stuff...all of that could have been an entire 15 episode S2. Just a "dual POV" story about the war from the Starfleet and Klingon perspectives. S1 could have focused on showing the 2 sides of the conflict, setting up characters in Starfleet aboard the Discovery and how their relationships work. Show the toll the war takes on everyone and on our values. Slow-burn more about the Lorca mystery. Slow-burn the "Tyler / Voq / L'Rell" plot line and make that far more developed and logical.
Then, after 15 episodes, S1 basically ends on "Into the Forrest" and S2 picks up with the revelation that we are in the MU in "Despite Yourself." Now, you can develop that far more as well. Put more mystery around who the emperor might be. Dive much deeper into the inner conflict of these characters as they struggle to cope with who they are in this other, brutal universe. Put more into the quest to find the Defiant data. Slow-burn the relationship between Lorca and Michael. Slow-burn the relationship between Burnham and MUGeorgiou. Then, in the last 4 episodes (not 1-2), wrap the war up in a much more well-developed and satisfying fashion, setting yourself up for a clean slate in S3.
I'm not saying make any changes or go in a different direction. I liked the story and I liked the threads that played throughout. I just think that it never took enough time to develop much of it as richly and as carefully as it could have been. Go slower. Take 2-3 episodes where maybe they only took 1. If they did that, they might have had a GREAT (not "good to very good") first season.
But, as it is, there were a ton of really great, really interesting ideas and characters thrown into the S1 mix that never had a chance to really fully bake and reach their full potential. It's one of the reasons that now, upon my re-watch, the more "stand alone" episodes like "Lethe" and "Magic" seem to hold up much better than they did when I first viewed the series.
I think the biggest "missed opportunity" in DSC was "scope vs. time" quite frankly.
What do I mean by that?
The story arc that was conceived was far too complicated and had far too much potential for richness and depth to be wrapped up effectively in 15 episodes. Having all of these major elements woven into S1:
- Klingon / Federation conflict
- Mirror Universe arc
- Burnham's redemption arc
- Ash / Voq / L'Rell storyline
- Ash / Burnham relationship
- Who is Lorca?
- Lorca / Burnham relationship
- Burnham's Vulcan vs. Human story
- Burnham's relationship with Sarek and Amanda
- Klingon divided houses
- Overarching theme of Georgiou's Fate (tied to Mirror Universe)
- Tardigrade arc
- Stamets connection to the network
- Stamets and Culber relationship
...it was just too much in too short a time. Hell, you could have done an entire 15 episode season on just the Klingon War and the state that the separate Klingon houses find themselves in. No MU stuff...no "Lorca is teh bad!!1!" stuff...all of that could have been an entire 15 episode S2. Just a "dual POV" story about the war from the Starfleet and Klingon perspectives. S1 could have focused on showing the 2 sides of the conflict, setting up characters in Starfleet aboard the Discovery and how their relationships work. Show the toll the war takes on everyone and on our values. Slow-burn more about the Lorca mystery. Slow-burn the "Tyler / Voq / L'Rell" plot line and make that far more developed and logical.
Then, after 15 episodes, S1 basically ends on "Into the Forrest" and S2 picks up with the revelation that we are in the MU in "Despite Yourself." Now, you can develop that far more as well. Put more mystery around who the emperor might be. Dive much deeper into the inner conflict of these characters as they struggle to cope with who they are in this other, brutal universe. Put more into the quest to find the Defiant data. Slow-burn the relationship between Lorca and Michael. Slow-burn the relationship between Burnham and MUGeorgiou. Then, in the last 4 episodes (not 1-2), wrap the war up in a much more well-developed and satisfying fashion, setting yourself up for a clean slate in S3.
I'm not saying make any changes or go in a different direction. I liked the story and I liked the threads that played throughout. I just think that it never took enough time to develop much of it as richly and as carefully as it could have been. Go slower. Take 2-3 episodes where maybe they only took 1. If they did that, they might have had a GREAT (not "good to very good") first season.
But, as it is, there were a ton of really great, really interesting ideas and characters thrown into the S1 mix that never had a chance to really fully bake and reach their full potential. It's one of the reasons that now, upon my re-watch, the more "stand alone" episodes like "Lethe" and "Magic" seem to hold up much better than they did when I first viewed the series.
Missed opportunity of the century: having Clint Howard's Orion character give Tilly a hit of his Klingon hookah with the words "I hope you relish it as much as I!"
I'd like S2 to flesh out more of the bridge characters and a few special side-characters. We were given good / decent backgrounds on Michael, Saru, Stamets, Tilly, Lorca, Tyler. I'm not criticizing a lack of it in S1 but I would want to get a few flashes into the rest of the main crew to really gain my investment in what happens to them moving forward.
I mean that is a pretty well-rounded start and we are not beat over the head with too many character-driven background stories, but I feel like all of the other series gave a full complement of stories to each bridge officer and a complement of other main characters.
We could easily get more Saru background in the yet released Fear Itself novel, and I hope to see more interaction and dialogue for helm, comms, ops, etc. just as we eventually got for the Uhuras, Sulus, Datas, Neelix's and so forth.
I mean that is a pretty well-rounded start and we are not beat over the head with too many character-driven background stories, but I feel like all of the other series gave a full complement of stories to each bridge officer and a complement of other main characters.
We could easily get more Saru background in the yet released Fear Itself novel, and I hope to see more interaction and dialogue for helm, comms, ops, etc. just as we eventually got for the Uhuras, Sulus, Datas, Neelix's and so forth.
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