Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 3x07 - "Unification III"

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Discovery' started by Commander Richard, Nov 25, 2020.

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Rate the episode...

  1. 10 - Worth the wait.

    19.4%
  2. 9

    19.4%
  3. 8

    23.1%
  4. 7

    13.8%
  5. 6

    8.1%
  6. 5

    7.7%
  7. 4

    2.8%
  8. 3

    0.8%
  9. 2

    1.6%
  10. 1 - They should have stopped at "II".

    3.2%
  1. XCV330

    XCV330 Premium Member

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    I gave it a 5, which is as low as I have given any Discovery title, so take it as you will.

    This episode is not bad, but it I don't think it's good. It can aspire to fair. I honestly thought about going lower. But the actors tried hard.

    Where to start with. Beyer is out of her element. If people enjoy her work, please just let her continue to rip eyeballs out of sockets over in PIC. This was a boring episode, a pointless episode with a lot of things thrown in that didn't need to be there.

    I like Tilly. A lot. She doesn't need to be an XO. And no one should be happy that she's an XO. Beyer is a writer who likes to do inevitable unfixable shit to characters she didn't develop, so.. well there you go. Really wish she'd stuck to Voyager novels.

    Burnam's Mom, who has a name but I can't remember it, has gone from being crabby all-knowing super inventor space mom to Romulan Truth Warrior Nun in less than a year. And she's a legal advocate for a civilization she's had, again, not that much time to integrate into. Could we at least get a sword fighting training montage. That last sentence is sarcastic. But it would have made this episode more interesting

    But that's ok because Burnham's year as a courier has likewise changed her in amazingly powerful ways that only Nun Mom can understand. Fortunately Warrior Nun Mom also knows all the intricacies of Ni'Varian socio-political conflicts.

    No Linus, No Georgio, No Culber, No Reno. No Adira. No Adira's ghost boyfriend. Stamets and the bridge crew reduced to Tilly's chorus line. In a Bottle Episode.

    Burnham Sermons have been replaced with Burnham Confessions. But then Beyer likes a tortured lead with issues they have to work out in public. I

    The Spock footage felt like a cheap ploy to pull emotional heart strings. It's fine. It was going to happen at some point. Get it over with. Send some money to the Nimoy estate. I felt like the episode was at risk of becoming a commercial for Picard season 2.

    The highly emotional Vulcan Tiki Torch Logic Debate was not very logical. It was badly written.

    Burhnam: "Honored pointies, let's take a moment to worship my brother. Now then, I am here to present some logical facts."
    Middle Nivarian "We already read your notes. It's crap. We don't need to have a hearing. Court adjourned.."
    Burnham "Yes, but wait till my mom gets me to cry! She's my lawyer too. I think."
    Space Nun Mom: "It's true. She's a total butthead. She lies. She's a bad officer. Pretty much everyone hates her. Don't believe a word she says. I'm here on her behalf."
    Middle Nivarian "I don't care. I read the paper, it's crap."
    Left Nivarian "Wait, I want to hear her cry. I heard she's good at this bit."
    Middle Nivarian "You're crap, too"
    Right Nivarian "Hear the man out "
    Middle Nivarian "You're part Romulan, fuck you too. In fact, let's have a war!"
    Burnham "Stop! Don't cut the baby in half I give up"
    Space Nun Mom "Wrong thing Burnham"
    Burnham "Oh right. as it is written Bang a Gong. Get it on. Bang a gong."
    P'resident Trina "I like that Burnham. She's got moxie, I tell ya. Hey.. space nun.. give her this secret hard drive I happened to have to your kid. Many bothans died, to bring us this information. Seriously. I look like Mon Mothma, right? Never mind. I'm gonna go canoodle that tall glass of Kelpian"
     
  2. Mr Awe

    Mr Awe Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I gave this one a 6. Ugh. I could not get into this one. First, the good side. The writing and performances for Saru and the Vulcan President was top notch. Excellent!

    But the trial thing with all the supposed the truth laid bare drama did not work. If only you can bare your soul and be honest, you'll get your data. Yeah, I know it was supposedly more than that. But none of it rang true.

    I also don't like how we're getting the answers to the burn. So there were supposedly three black boxes before. We got part of the story for one of those. Not sure who found the others. Then we get a partial solution. We need a lot more data. Voila! Someone else gathered it! But no one else figured out how to use. So, we need melodrama to get data that someone else collected. Should've been a quest through this new era to get the data themselves. Show us the Discovery crew finding the data rather than telling us that someone else already collected it more than a century ago!

    I usually like Discovery but this one didn't work. Hoping for an improvement.
     
  3. wayoung

    wayoung Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Anyone else find it weird Starfleet didn't recover ANY black boxes from any of its destroyed ships?
     
  4. Bad Thoughts

    Bad Thoughts Vice Admiral Admiral

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    OK, this is Burnett's argument: the episode is anti-semitic because, since Vulcans are stand-ins for Jews, the episode was a pro-BDS takedown of Israel.

    He's full of shit.
     
  5. XCV330

    XCV330 Premium Member

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    if he weren't yelling so loud the asswipe would be back in obscurity where he belongs and where he will quickly return
     
  6. Noname Given

    Noname Given Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Actually no. The Discovery crew was the only crew in Starfleet who knew the actual story.

    The Captain Georgiou just retired story was for the rest of the Federation and any Starfleet personnel that came aboard Discovery for a short period as needed (such as Captain Christopher Pike).
     
  7. unimatrix7

    unimatrix7 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Maybe ‘pop up’ is Australian slang.

    Pop up = randomly appear
     
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  8. ScottJ85

    ScottJ85 Captain Captain

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    am Australian, can confirm
     
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  9. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    And while we don't quite hear anybody tell Gabrielle this whole story, it's sort of inevitable that she would know. Not only does she spend time around the heroes, including the obviously-not-Georgiou, during her captivity - she actively stalks her daughter, and probably was there when T'Kumva killed the Real McGeorgiou anyway. Heck, perhaps the Angel Suit also can access the Mirror Universe?

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  10. John Clark

    John Clark Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Use it in my region of the UK too (Same meaning)
     
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  11. SolarisOne

    SolarisOne Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Yeah. I think people forgot that part.

    I think that if this episode didn't involve the reunification of my favorite two Trek races, I would have rated it a low 7. Tilly getting a mid-season upgrade to XO doesn't bother me nearly as much as it should, considering that the workings of the real-life military is one of my special interests--Trek almost universally sucks with realism in that area and always has. And Nu-Kirk's leapfrogging was even worse.:shrug:

    Burnham?
    [​IMG]
    Someone compared her to Beckett Mariner in one of the many threads I've perused this week. How about, no? Beckett Mariner is pretty much my favorite character in all of Trek right now. Burnham is just there and ... I feel nothing when I think about her. I feel more for the fucking bridge extras whose names I mostly don't even know. I feel more for her mother. I feel a lot more for Adira, gods bless their soul. I feel more for Book. I feel more for the Ni'Vari President, even. The closest I've come to caring about Burnham is when she and Georgiou and Book were working together, outside the Starfleet chain-of-command.

    I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but it's just so frustrating. Burnham is the series lead!
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2020
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  12. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Mother Burnham was even there when Spock threw the chess board across the room.
     
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  13. Discofan

    Discofan Admiral Admiral

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    Yes, she probably saw her die a hundred times too and each time managed to get her back by changing something in the timeline and that means when she was thrown back with a disabled time suit, Michael for the first time in her life was on her own.
     
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  14. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    I've never thought of that before.... But I thought the crystals were not good for hundreds of trips.
     
  15. donners22

    donners22 Commodore Commodore

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    I tend to agree; the three episodes she’s written are my least favourite Disco and Picard episodes.
     
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  16. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Only Po's impromptu method of energizing them was no good. Charging up on a supernova was how it was supposed to work, and apparently it worked fine in creating a durable power source for the suit.

    Basically, then, our heroes could build another suit out of the S31 specs; get another crystal from Boreth; and jump to a supernova to get it all properly charged. Perhaps this is indeed gonna happen later in the season, bringing the Klingons back into the game and allowing for a Tyler/Voq or Tenavik appearance... And allowing Georgiou to return to the 23rd century for her scheduled spinoff appearance.

    Lots of mysteries about the suits remain. Why did Gabrielle get stuck with that "anchor" at Terralysium but Michael did not? Where's Gabrielle's suit now? Or is it in now? Who did the initial Seven Signs and why? What will happen to time travel of this sort in a galaxy that has bitterly fought time travelers for whatever reasons? DSC ought to address some of these at some point, but S3 need not be it yet.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  17. Agony_Boothb

    Agony_Boothb Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    How's that now?

    Also, I thought the Ferengi were often seen as the anti-semitic jewish stereotype race?
     
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  18. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    After reading EAS' predictable review where they don't even mention the message of the episode, I realise I didn't last night and I having not read the entire thread I'm not sure anyone else has either:

    It was about the danger of politicizing science, an incredibly topical issue at the moment.
     
  19. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    I think that ship has sailed now. I don't think we will ever find out answers to all that. But it's fun to speculate and make up your own ideas. I mean for the original red signals wasn't that Michael all along?
     
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  20. Scionz

    Scionz Commander Red Shirt

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    So I think I understand thematically why for (what I think is) the 3rd episode, we've seen Discovery jump in, and planetary defenses activate. I think it's important part of the show and intentional. These writers are very smart.

    First a little history.

    The Burn and the much reduce Federation is basically a Star Trek future version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. For hundreds of years the Roman Empire grew out from its corner of Italy, to the entire peninsula, then into Spain, Gaul, Greece, the modern day former Yugoslavia, North Africa, the Levant and Asia Minor, eventually into Britain and Germania. And then the Roman Empire stopped growing. It hit natural geographic barriers (the Sarhara desert, the Seas, major mountains) and powerful yet distant bordering neighbors in modern day Iran, India and even further, China. In a sense, the Roman Empire expanded until it could expand no more, and then it spend tremendous resources sustaining the size it expanded to, and while it worked for a while, it entered a slow decline.

    In Star Trek, the word "Planets" for the Federation, as we all know, is used very loosely. In some cases it could mean, literally, a single planet that is a member. In other cases, it could mean a whole Star System with a lot of planets that count as "one planet". And we know it could encompass even larger political organizations - the Andorian Empire for example. And if the Klingons joined by the 26th century, the chances of it being just the Klingon Homeworld? Of course not. A large chunk of the Klingon Empire joining would be akin to Texas joining the US. Point being, at 350 planets at its height, the Federation could have encompassed much of the Galaxy, especially if it added lots of "Texas'" by incorporating the Klingons, or the Kazon, and heck, maybe even major powers we didn't ever see. We don't know at this point. But let's just say in effect, the Federation had more or less grown everywhere it could grow, and growing more would involve outright conquering neighbors who maybe wouldn't want to join willingly, such as the ancient Dominion, which the Federation would never do.

    In a sense, Rome and the Federation are one and the same. At their maximum extent, they encompassed almost the entirety of their world.

    What about those Planetary Defenses that the show keeps making very clear we see for thematic reasons? They're analogous to city walls.

    In antiquity, before the Roman Empire, cities and city states in Europe build walls to protect against sacking by invaders. Maybe neighboring states or marauding tribes. Rome too, had walls early in its history. But as the Roman Empire grew and its roads grew (analogous to warp drive in its own way) and economic activity flourished, the population of cities grew and the :"borders of safety" expanded to the frontier of the Roman Empire that was protected by the Romany Army. Cities started to build outside their walls. They dismantled them to reuse the valuable stone. But they didn't need them, because there was simply no risk of the kind of dangers to their cities that their ancestors knew.

    But then the Roman Empire began to decline. The Roman Legion grew weaker. The resources far fewer and it started to lose fights it once would have won. Roving tribes of Gauls and Goths started to threaten cities far in the interior again. Walls started to go up. And when the empire fell and the security of the Roman state was gone, walled cities spread across Europe and grew in sophistication and size until the invention of cannon a thousand years later rendered them obsolete. But before that, for a good 400 years or more, walled cities in many parts of Europe were simply not needed.

    Looking at the Galaxy in the time of Discovery, I'm reminded a lot of the period of Enterprise, when the galaxy was a dangerous place. There were a many petty warlords and marauding dangers. And despite interstellar activity well predating United Earth's entry into politics of local space, the Romulans, the Tellarites and the Andorians had maintained a kind of city-state like status quo for a few hundred years. They all had interstellar capability, but kept their ships close to home, either their planet or their system, to protect it. They had planetary defenses.

    The Federation, with Starfleet, made this entire concept obsolete. It made the "walls" of planetary defenses as unneeded as the wall was to cities during the height of the Roman Empire, to the point the Borg strolled to Earth twice without any resistance, to the point the Breen could raid San Francisco, and the Dominion capture Betazed. And with the Federation growing in size and power over the next 800 years, there were no more need for "walls".

    And then it all came apart, and suddenly, the walls - planetary defenses - went right back up, in elaborate forums.

    The writers are putting planetary defenses as a way to show that this isn't the Galaxy that we knew back in the shows we've seen before, but in more specific sense, with "Rome" having fell, it is illustrative of the walled nature and "city state" level the galaxy has regressed to, not unlike much of Europe in the 6th or 7th century. Saru's analogy in an earlier Episode about the European Dark Ages makes this even more literal.

    I hope if this show moves in the direction of the Federation being restored over time, they make a point of the dismantling of these defenses - these walls as Starfleet starts to build bridges between worlds again.