Spoilers SFDebris' "What's Past Is Prologue"-review
- Thread starter Rahul
- Start date
I'm not using it as a pass. If the spore drive doesn't work (as Chuck so eloquently notes) then by all means, it doesn't work. But, it doesn't ruin Discovery, any more than bad science in the past has ruined other Star Trek.
The most successful film of the year sees a guy stealing gems only to place them in a metal glove to make people all over the universe poof into dust at random.
Maybe it's time to admit skiffy isn't your thing.
I said "skiffy" to myself out loud at least three times before I got it.
Did that ruin VOY? Because the VOY forum keeps insisting that there are better episodes out there.
If every subsequent episode involved that, I would say yes.
I guess that depends on the person then.
Eh, I dunno. At least to me the difference is that the Spore drive should have been set up and used as a plot device. It's a weird concept, but okay - we can go instantaneously to anywhere in the universe - and apparently anywhere in time as well, along with any alternate universe. There are literally infinite possibilities. Set the garbage pseudoscience up, and strap us in for a ride.
But it didn't work that way. We didn't really do much with the spore drive. Yet it became one of the central plot arcs of the whole season - We got a friggin three-parter partially built around the tardigrade. Then Stamets becomes the navigator, and everything related to his character is all spores all the time. We find out they underpin all life in the universe. We go on some sort of spore trip to a dreamlike world where spirits of the dead talk to him. He uses The Force to guide our crew back home. And then they're out of spores, but magically grow new ones in about 45 seconds.
This is really in contrast to how Trek has treated bad science in the past, which is basically "pay no attention to the man behind the camera." Technobabble really is just that. It was often originally scriped "tech the tech" or some such in the rough drafts, with the "science consultants" adding something which sounded plausible enough we wouldn't balk. It was dumb, and unneeded (one reason why TOS and DS9 are superior is they avoided it), but it was aural filler, and constructed to make that clear.
Or hell, take Red Matter in ST09. Red Matter is stupid - it's an obvious MacGuffin. But the movie doesn't even attempt to explain what Red Matter does. This is the best stance to take, because it allows the viewer to quickly move on from the implausibility, and pay attention to other elements of the movie.
By repeatedly focusing on the mycelial network - and continually one-upping the lore around it, eventually turning it into The Force - they're making sure we can't just move on and take it for granted as part of the background of the show. That was a mistake - maybe not the worst one the season made, but a mistake nonetheless.
I'm not saying its not a mistake. I'm just saying it doesn't negatively impact my view of the show, any more than other examples did for other shows.
To be fair, it's Voyager. Keeping two of the main cast as lizards and adding their little lizard children might have been an improvement.
That's a good point.
I couldn't agree more!
Now I have to say, both the red matter and the Infinity Stones in Avengers were really dumb McGuffins, and for my personal taste, they both kinda' took a small toll on my enjoyment of each film. But they were used very clever, and most importantly, all the character work and motivations around them were really solid!
On DIS I really never could get over that fucking stupid giant galaxy spanning mushroom. There is more realism in tornados carrying sharks than that. If they just wanted to have a super-drive, they could have said they found a super rare super-subspace-dilithium crystal or something, and then let it stand, like they (wisely!) did with Mudd's stupid magic time-travel balls.
But really clever magic McGuffins do more than just serve their plot purpose: They also have logical explanation on their own that's not too absurd - like, say, Tony Starks arc reactor, the death star plans or, yes, Star Trek's warp reactor most of the time.
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Holy shit! I just spit out my coffe laughing!
That's a subtle but devastating dig at Discovery if I ever heard one!
As I have said before, the strange irony is that the spore drive - which should have been used as a plot device - was used as a major plot arc. But in contrast, the Klingon War - which should have been a central plot arc, was just used as a plot device. The war was set up with the flimsiest of explanations, basically ignored except as a background element in favor inter-character drama and spores through the entire season, and resolved by the ass pull of two people talking in a room. The writers were clearly completely and totally disinterested in the war - maybe because it was something Fuller planned to work with, and they had no idea how to write decent military sci-fi.
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