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Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x09 - "Project Daedalus"

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The last three episodes have been making a better and more convincing attempt to be emotionally resonant. Certainly it's an improvement in that regard on anything Braga managed in his last few years. They've also thought outside the box a bit more on this year's big reveal with the Red Angel. Pacing and structure holds together better too. Emperor Georgiou is still a car crash of a character though. What on earth are the producers thinking?
 
Honestly, it never made sense to me - since Vulcan is overall a hot and arid world with a thinner atmosphere - that Vulcans were mostly white. I mean, I don't think the spectral class of the star of the Vulcan system was ever categorically said, but Vulcan almost certainly has higher levels of ultraviolet radiation than Earth, which should mean darker skin.
 
What about dozens of white actors who portrayed Othello? Anyway, changing appearance is a part of actor's job.
A white actor as Othello is problematic if the whole point is that the character is black specifically.
With the exception of that one time Patrick Stewart played him in a role reversal situation while the rest of the cast was black. But that kept the theme of racial outcast intact.
 
No one expects a white actor, with natural straight hair, playing the part of a Vulcan to wear an afro looking wig do they? There is/was no production reason to straighten the hair of a female black actor, whether its a bowl hair cut or otherwise.

If that's your final opinion, fine. But I (and others) have already expressed a different opinion on this that you seem to want to ignore. I'm not going to reiterate here.

All it does is expose the real life racial, cultural ignorance of the production team. If you do not understand my post ask any black female that you know about the cultural pressure of straightening their hair texture, and the traditional, denigration of natural, afro textured, black hair.

You don't need to lecture me. I am ignorant by any means. And, based on previous comments in this thread, I beg to differ. I have no clue, of course, what race or ethnicity you are, but I think we've even had a dark complexioned individual comment that did not quite share your opinion (I truly hope that doesn't offend that person by (somewhat) singling them out).

When the TNG producers decided that Vulcans were not only light, bright, and damn near (greeny) white there was no reason to give them hair textures different from the real life ethnic origins of the actors. I give them a pass since it was the 90's, its now 2019 they can at least broaden their imagination and stop treating eurocentric hair texture as the default.

Why do you keep ignoring that black actors have played Vulcans without a bowl cut?

And to conclude, I truly do understand that things like this have been, and continue to be, a problem. But I do not think this is a time where it is a problem, and painting the production staff with a broad brush and labeling them ignorant is just unfair.
 
Whilst generally I'd wish Trek aliens would display more individualism in their stylistic choice, Vulcans are the one case where most of the population opting for 'the most logical haircut' makes some sense. However, if your hair happens to be naturally curly, straightening it doesn't seem very logical to me.
 
Whilst generally I'd wish Trek aliens would display more individualism in their stylistic choice, Vulcans are the one case where most of the population opting for 'the most logical haircut' makes some sense. However, if your hair happens to be naturally curly, straightening it doesn't seem very logical to me.
I tend to agree, but really, the most logical haircut is a buzz and a shave. Vulcans should, logically, be cue balls. :techman:
 
I only just watched this last night along with "The Red Angel".

Pretty neat that they have the original Airiam actress now taking Airiam 2.0's ship position.

Funnily, even though she never had an episode focused her, having her around from the start at least helps me buy in that the crew would be upset at her loss. This is in contrast to how VOYAGER used to handle things, where they just flat out introduce a totally new character that everyone had been friends with since the beginning. I think the worst was "Ashes", featuring a character returning to the dead that Harry Kim had feelings for.

The only time this method worked perfectly was in "Latent Image" because that story was from the Doctor's perspective of learning about a crewmember he doesn't remember because Janeway erased his memories of her.

DS9 kinda tried this with introducing O'Brien's assistant in the back half of S1, to later be revealed as an assassin for the finale.

I just think it's too bad Airiam did not get more to do prior. Sounds like she was basically RoboCop only she had her own agency. There's still some human in her, but how much of her former self was there left?
 
This proves it: DSC's Control can't be the same one from the novel. In the novel, Control uses amoral methods at times, but its singular goal is to preserve the Federation, not annihilate all sentient life.

The "Terminator"-style stories are hackneyed as f**k, and I really hope the DSC folks pull a fast one on us and avoid that tired trope.


All I see when I look at Quinto's Spock is his earlier character, Sylar.
Sylar-Heroes-NBC-Zachary-Quinto-o.jpg

That's all I'm ever going to see.

Yup. Heroes definitely contributed to ruining the reboot movies for me. Couldn't stand Spock, or get over Kirk's quick promotion.
 
We still don't know why our heroes had to brave the minefield in the first place.

I mean, the S31 station was there within visual range. The heroes wanted to beam aboard, and eventually did. What was the point of flying through the minefield first?
Did they ever establish how far they were away in dialog? One of the issues Star Trek has had in the past (obviously, so that everything looks good on your television) is a disconnect between dialog and visuals when it comes to distances in space. How many times has a crew member said such and such ship are x kilometers apart then when the view switches to that outside the ship the distance appears to be about 150 feet?
 
Like dilithium, time crystals actually exist as a real world counterpart to thier Trek versions.
Now that you mention it dilithium is a very good comparison to the time crystals. Both dilithium and time crystals are things in actualy science (dilithum being the gas Li2 and time crystals a structure that repeats in time and in space, as opposed to only in space [which sounds really fucking cool]), but they are entirely unrelated to their Trek counterparts (dilithium being an element with the same atomic mass as the actually existing element francium that can be found in a solid state and time crystals being crystals that can be used for time travel and loops).
 
Which smacks of real-world practices: words get redefined all the time, often within the lifetime of the technology or phenomenon they describe. Say, "kinetic weapons" today are nukes rather than just bullets, while "atomic" is pretty much the antithesis of "nuclear" and pertains to nanotech and perhaps chemical weapons instead. So both our time crystals and theirs could exist in the same terminological universe...

Did they ever establish how far they were away in dialog? One of the issues Star Trek has had in the past (obviously, so that everything looks good on your television) is a disconnect between dialog and visuals when it comes to distances in space. How many times has a crew member said such and such ship are x kilometers apart then when the view switches to that outside the ship the distance appears to be about 150 feet?

If we discount the visuals altogether, dialogue gives us only ambiguity:

- "Lower the shields and take us closer" is what Pike wants. Is that what he ultimately wants (that is, he doesn't want to dock with the station, just to get a bit closer), or how he cautiously wants to start out? The action of getting "closer" doesn't yet take the heroes into the minefield, and Burnham and Spock can bicker in the former's quarters because there is no alert status yet.
- "Scans" are also being performed long before the ship reaches the first mines. Is scanning into a former prison possible at ranges greater than transporting into said?
- After the mines defeat the ship's attempt at reaching her (unknown) destination, the fake Patar says "a S31 ship" will come for our heroes, and apparently perform the "boarding" that Patar threatens the heroes with. If they were within transporter range of the station at that point (a random point in time and space where the mine attacks suddenly ceased because Airiam got through), why are the heroes not surprised that the station will not be the party doing the boarding?
- Pike then orders further "scans", as if they'd work better now - but the end result is "your guess is as good as mine", so perhaps nothing changed there. The ship can't move at warp or impulse, but Pike wants Detmer to "do [her] best to keep us in range", perhaps with thrusters.

And suddenly the transporter raid of the station is a splendid success, although transporter evacuation apparently isn't possible, nor is the insertion of further troops. So perhaps Control just lowered its defenses for a moment to allow Airiam in?

But in that case we could argue that the heroes were always at transporter range, from the moment they dropped out of warp, and this simply was irrelevant because "Patar" wasn't letting them in. Until it did. So perhaps Pike was dismissing the use of transporters from the get-go and attempting forced docking instead, until it turned out "Patar"/Control decided to cooperate and the boarding could be done with transporter after all?

Timo Saloniemi
 
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