The acting throughout the show has been mostly top notch. A shame the writing has let them down more often than not.
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 2x11 - "Perpetual Infinity"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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The acting throughout the show has been mostly top notch. A shame the writing has let them down more often than not.
As I said, I'm liking the Spock-Burnham dynamic. I think it's very snappily-written, almost Tracy-Hepburn-esque.
But plot matters too and I would like not to know what's going to happen with main storyline. In some episodic shows, yeah, y'know the E isn't gonna blow up, but you might not know how the plot will work out. But I know in DSC that this whole premise -- ALL life will be wiped out -- simply will not happen. This is true with a lot of Trek. Maybe there's whales or Roy Orbison tunes along the way, for fun, so ok, I guess.
What if the arc didn't have such a huge stake guaranteed not to happen? Something smaller bad that certainly had the chance of coming true?
If all that matters is character development, we have soap opera, or literary fiction, which is fine too, but I like sci-fi for what-ifs and dilemmas. Now we're just waiting for HOW they stop control, not IF. So there's still some unknown (the how), I just don't care that much. !We need that Pike/Spock/Saru episodic spin-off, where each episode I don't know a pre-detrmined outcome. (Ooh -- other than that chair that shall not be named. boop boop)
Young James Kirk shows up in the final episode and has a chat to Control and it implodes
I'm not ashamed to say that I never grasped 75% of what was going on in this episode.
It was confusion personified, aided and abeted by technobabble solutions re sending the suit into the future, but saving "mom"
I find most "time" episodes in Trek tedious in the extreme, the tendency to tie themselves in knots always surfaces
I think that Leland and Control are steering towards a Borg reveal, or is that too obvious ?
Tyler in the escape pod could be a precursor to a secondary Control infection, this time on Discovery, or perhaps it could be setting up a moral dilemma for Culber, who may have to save the life of the man who "killed" him
The whole Universe's fate has, it seems, been in the hands of the extended family of Burnham and Spock all this time, well that just seems so convenient, not the first time I've mentioned this.
I find the scenes with Spock in them to be a study in smugness, and the Chess ending while the Universe is in mortal danger, plain dumb.
In this 50 minutes we had Pike, Stamets, Saru and Tilly relegated to mere extras status, and without them getting decent screen time, the story suffered.
No grading from me yet, I'll have to watch it again to fully understand what the fuck was going on, sorry.
It was confusion personified, aided and abeted by technobabble solutions re sending the suit into the future, but saving "mom"
I find most "time" episodes in Trek tedious in the extreme, the tendency to tie themselves in knots always surfaces
I think that Leland and Control are steering towards a Borg reveal, or is that too obvious ?
Tyler in the escape pod could be a precursor to a secondary Control infection, this time on Discovery, or perhaps it could be setting up a moral dilemma for Culber, who may have to save the life of the man who "killed" him
The whole Universe's fate has, it seems, been in the hands of the extended family of Burnham and Spock all this time, well that just seems so convenient, not the first time I've mentioned this.
I find the scenes with Spock in them to be a study in smugness, and the Chess ending while the Universe is in mortal danger, plain dumb.
In this 50 minutes we had Pike, Stamets, Saru and Tilly relegated to mere extras status, and without them getting decent screen time, the story suffered.
No grading from me yet, I'll have to watch it again to fully understand what the fuck was going on, sorry.
A much better ending than Leland in Delta Quadrant saying “Resistance is Futile”
As I said elsewhere, the problem with the Borg is they are fundamentally a horror concept. There are a lot of elements of creepiness which they tap into, including fear of loss of autonomy/identity, fear of mutilation, etc. But like all horror concepts, they only work well when they aren't clearly explained. Exposition is the death of good horror.
I think the Borg have been used correctly basically three times - Q Who, Best of Both Worlds Part 1, and Enterprise's Regeneration. It's actually shocking how good that episode was, considering that VOY systematically destroyed the race, and ENT did so little that was effective otherwise in Season 2.
Mileage will vary. I do not mind as much watching for the "How." To me, SF is about the how, the use of technology, how people will change and grow and develop through the advent of different technology. Or, on the other end, how they will respond to technological growth or change, such as the M-5 computer. To me, Control could explain a lot about Federation society and attitudes towards tech in the future. I love the consequences as much as the How.
I personally don't mind knowing pre-determined outcomes. That obviously will vary from person to person.
As a general rule, I do not like horror. The Borg was one of the few times that it worked OK, as you noted. But, it became even less interesting because whatever drove the Borg in BOBW was gone. So, it left a very odd shaped hole. And, every attempt to fill it in became less and less satisfying or engaging.
In addition, as much as people complain about revisiting old aspects of Trek lore (not targeting anyone in particular) but at least with Pike there is an untrod territory. Now, I'll admit my bias in that I enjoyed seeing more aspects of Sarek, the Klingons, and Spock, in addition to Pike but it remains that Pike is largely untapped in terms of lore.
I have yet to see an argument for what could be explored in the Borg that hasn't been touched on before. As you stated, they are a horror concept, reminiscent of zombies. Well, I got over zombies after "Living Dead" and, in my opinion, the Borg should be treated like said zombies-shoot the concept in the head and let it rest.
So who was the initial creator or designer of Control?
I wonder what the sales pitch was to have it installed throughout the Federation?
I wonder what the sales pitch was to have it installed throughout the Federation?
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I asked that question about 10 or 15 pages ago.
We have not yet seen or been told specifically who or what created Control.
Funny how that particular episode keeps coming up in our conversations since the start of DISCOVERY.
it was a goof in this episode but he is not pissed
https://twitter.com/wcruz73/status/1112025198356684800
Funny how that particular episode keeps coming up in our conversations since the start of DISCOVERY.
"Well that's not very creative." - Saru.
The TOS episode "Spock's Brain" ... The first episode of season 3.
Blair's mom from The Facts of Life was into some WEIRD stuff.
OK in the photo it looks so much newer and nicer
Marathon reply session! 
Lotsa thought-provoking stuff in this thread...
But to do it well, you have to do the heavy lifting up front to make the story structurally sound... among other things, you have to establish the existence of players with a POV from outside the (malleable) timestream, you have to establish clear and meaningful stakes, you have to have a solid grasp of causal logic, you have to devise and use a consistent set of time-travel rules employing that logic, and you have to have some emotionally resonant conclusion in mind from the start.
Asimov did all of that. Berman and Braga did precisely none of it. They just threw random puzzle pieces at the audience for three years, without any sense of the bigger picture those pieces supposedly fit into.
Lotsa thought-provoking stuff in this thread...It's a sure sign of sloppy writing when a story merely shows (or even just tells!) the audience that a thing happens, without sufficient explanation as to why and how. The underlying assumption is that if the audience saw or heard something, they'll simply accept it at face value without asking questions... even if the thing practically screams for questions to be asked. It's been a recurring complaint even on shows as complex as Game of Thrones (especially the last couple of seasons, since Benioff and Weiss went past what Martin had written and had to rely on their own devices), and Trek has certainly never been immune... but it also hasn't usually indulged quite as blatantly as the past couple of weeks.
I don't really understand why the show would be doing this kind of blatant mid-arc course-correction (or misdirection) to begin with, even though we're all speculating about it being the case. Okay: the showrunners were shown the door. But that was specifically said to be for behavioral reasons (even though "creative differences" is a standard-issue Hollywood excuse!), and the rest of the writing staff remained the same, no? So why would anyone involved (including Kurtzman) think that the change called for a screeching pivot in the direction of the story arc, or that attempting one was a good idea?
It's a thankless job, but at least he's in the episodes. Meanwhile, where is Reno? Everyone seems to have enjoyed Tig Notaro's appearances so far, so why not use her more? Heck, for that matter, where is Cornwell? For a serialized story, DSC seems to have a hard time remembering who's on board from one week to the next.
This seems like a contradictory position to take. A show can ask audience members to turn off their critical thinking skills and just let "entertainment" wash over them (I usually try to avoid those kinds of shows, because I enjoy critical thinking, but YMMV)... or a show can ask them to put in the effort of filling in the narrative connective tissue that the writers have left out. But it can't really ask both things at the same time, at least not without generating cognitive dissonance.
I think @SolarisOne has the right interpretation of things here... but the simple fact that something as important as this (the nature and motivation of the villain!) could so easily be understood in different ways by different viewers says that the writing suffers from a serious lack of clarity.
Would you want to put money on that outcome? We're talking about the DSC writers here. If they do it badly, which seems the far safer bet, it would be a narrative clusterfuck of massive proportions.
No, it was a problem from the beginning. The concept of a stealth war across the timestream, being fought with the lives of unwitting proxies, isn't inherently a bad one... in fact it can be done well or even brilliantly; Asimov's classic novel The End of Eternity springs to mind as an example.
But to do it well, you have to do the heavy lifting up front to make the story structurally sound... among other things, you have to establish the existence of players with a POV from outside the (malleable) timestream, you have to establish clear and meaningful stakes, you have to have a solid grasp of causal logic, you have to devise and use a consistent set of time-travel rules employing that logic, and you have to have some emotionally resonant conclusion in mind from the start.
Asimov did all of that. Berman and Braga did precisely none of it. They just threw random puzzle pieces at the audience for three years, without any sense of the bigger picture those pieces supposedly fit into.
Indeed! In particular, I wondered this...
One can fanwank that to an extent...
...but that doesn't really accomplish much, because it still begs the question: why did the writers have Mama Burnham say she'd steered the Sphere toward Discovery in the first place, if that fact would invite the questions (and require these assumptions) from the audience, when it would have been far easier just to skip that bit of dialogue completely, and let everyone continue to assume that the encounter with the Sphere was unrelated to the main RA plot?
How do you figure? I haven't seen anything on-screen to suggest this.
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