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

Rate the episode...


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Which other eps of DSC and PIC has she written?

DIS Season 1: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

IMHO, the worst episode of the first season. The planet-side A-plot could have been good, if they had fixed a few issues (energy beings with yurts? And a giant crystal transmitter?) The B plot with Cornwell and L'Rell on the Ship of the Dead was totally incoherent though. I don't blame Beyer for this episode TBH, because I think poor direction choices and bad editing killed the story coherence. But it was still a low point in a bad season.

DIS Season 2: Saints of Imperfection

Tilly in the shroom-verse. I actually forgot she wrote this episode. Has the weird science-fantasy woo Discovery vibe of Berg-Harberts Trek, with the eye-rolling discussion of Culber's resurrected soul as "energy." There were some critical flaws in the episode, like the strange decision to tell a Tilly story from the POV of Burnham. And the Section 31 B-plot was basically useless. I remember the dialogue in this episode being awful though - a mixture of clunky exposition meant to tech the tech to plot the plot, and heavy Georgiou cattiness.

PIC Season 1: Stardust City Rag

Close to the low point of Picard's first season. A weird attempt at a comedic "heist/caper" episode ala DS9 bookended by two gruesome murders. Awful dialogue once again - a mixture of clunky infodumps and cornball melodrama. Small-universe syndrome out the whazoo. Felt completely unneeded at the time, and feels even moreso now that the season is over, since they just wanted an excuse to use Seven for something. The only thing that saved it was there were no scenes of Soji and Narek canoodling on the Artifact.
 
DIS Season 1: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum

IMHO, the worst episode of the first season. The planet-side A-plot could have been good, if they had fixed a few issues (energy beings with yurts? And a giant crystal transmitter?) The B plot with Cornwell and L'Rell on the Ship of the Dead was totally incoherent though. I don't blame Beyer for this episode TBH, because I think poor direction choices and bad editing killed the story coherence. But it was still a low point in a bad season.

DIS Season 2: Saints of Imperfection

Tilly in the shroom-verse. I actually forgot she wrote this episode. Has the weird science-fantasy woo Discovery vibe of Berg-Harberts Trek, with the eye-rolling discussion of Culber's resurrected soul as "energy." There were some critical flaws in the episode, like the strange decision to tell a Tilly story from the POV of Burnham. And the Section 31 B-plot was basically useless. I remember the dialogue in this episode being awful though - a mixture of clunky exposition meant to tech the tech to plot the plot, and heavy Georgiou cattiness.

PIC Season 1: Stardust City Rag

Close to the low point of Picard's first season. A weird attempt at a comedic "heist/caper" episode ala DS9 bookended by two gruesome murders. Awful dialogue once again - a mixture of clunky infodumps and cornball melodrama. Small-universe syndrome out the whazoo. Felt completely unneeded at the time, and feels even moreso now that the season is over, since they just wanted an excuse to use Seven for something. The only thing that saved it was there were no scenes of Soji and Narek canoodling on the Artifact.
To each their own. I disagree with your opinions on every single one of those episodes.
 
????? Isn't that true about every single Star Trek Episode that we have ever seen ????

We don't get to decide what the show does.

We get to decide to watch it, or not. (period)
:rolleyes:

Yes, we don't get to decide whether the show does something But we do get to decide whether the decisions of the show make a lick of sense or not.

If someone is arguing a Doylist position (something doesn't make sense as the author has written it) you do not respond back with a Watsonian argument (the story says there's no problem, so there's no problem).
 
This thread is particularly bad for some reason, despite the high rating in the poll.
Most bizarre of all is seeing that some people are ranting that the episode is anti-Semitic because they equate Vulcans with Jews (which I’d never before heard in 30 years of being a Trek fan). Some people just go out of their way to hate things, and if they can’t find anything to hate they’ll make something up. It’s sad. Fans suck the joy out of things these days. Maybe they always did, I dunno.

Maybe it's because the Vulcan hand salute is borrowed from a Jewish prayer ceremony.

Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I don’t even remotely know how they are equated with Jews?
Is it because the Romulans were displaced and chose to share the ancestral home with the remaining Vulcans with some tensions between them?

This part of the discussion arose because one particular supposed “big-name-fan” has a huge diatribe about this on social media in relation to this episode.

His somewhat unhinged commentary makes some fairly wild associations between fictional alien cultures in the future and a contemporary culture in the here and now. No-one else here had even mentioned this until someone happened to mention his ridiculous comments in passing (which was not an unreasonable thing to do) but it was not a part of the discussion here before that do please don’t lose sight of this.

Discussing it further, however, just gives him the oxygen of publicity. I honestly think this is one part of the discussion we should leave well alone now.

I think perhaps that folks have forgotten that the Jewish angle that appeared in this discussion, came from a post about a complete 'Ice-hole' raging about his imagined Star Trek connections to real-world events that happened over 70 years ago.

It wasn't because any of us wanted to go there.
:shifty:

Absolutely!!
 
To each their own. I disagree with your opinions on every single one of those episodes.

I've liked episodes in every season of Kurtzman Trek to date. In Discovery's First Season I thought Into the Forest I Go was a genuinely great episode, and Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad was a nice romp. In the second season I was partial to An Obol for Charon, If Memory Serves, and Project Daedalus. This season I thought Forget Me Not was fantastic, and People of Earth was pretty damn good as well. On Picard I adored The Impossible Box, and thought Remembrance, Absolute Candor, Nepenthe, and Broken Pieces were all good episodes as well.
 
Because the script said so...?
exactly. again poor writing. they need to deal with this script realistically. one reason this episode is jarring is that the previous episodes this season HAVE dealt with the crew as actual persons with hurts and flaws and various qualities. Unification III turned them into a bunch of muppets.
 
????? Isn't that true about every single Star Trek Episode that we have ever seen ????

We don't get to decide what the show does.

We get to decide to watch it, or not. (period)
:rolleyes:

All true! :hugegrin:

But that wasn’t quite what I meant...

More that relying on the fact that all the other characters went along with it is a fairly meaningless argument given that of course they would because the same writing that promoted Tilly also wrote that they were all down with it.
 
????? Isn't that true about every single Star Trek Episode that we have ever seen ????

We don't get to decide what the show does.

We get to decide to watch it, or not. (period)
:rolleyes:
Here's my thing. I can make sense of it with few exceptions if I'm invested in the characters. Discovery hasn't failed me in that regard, even if writing was lack luster at times. I make connections even if the writers didn't intend them. Been doing that since TOS and ain't about to stop now.
 
Yes, we don't get to decide whether the show does something But we do get to decide whether the decisions of the show make a lick of sense or not.

If someone is arguing a Doylist position (something doesn't make sense as the author has written it) you do not respond back with a Watsonian argument (the story says there's no problem, so there's no problem).
Only if one has a problem with it to being with.
I don't have a problem with it.

I'm not watching the show to evaluate every single decision the writers make.
I'm watching it to enjoy where they decide to take the characters and the final results the writers chose to make.
You hyper-realist evaluations essentially destroy any joy that might come from just going along for the ride.
That of course is your option, but it seems to me like a whole lot of wasted time and energy over something that none of us have a say in.
:shrug:
 
exactly. again poor writing. they need to deal with this script realistically. one reason this episode is jarring is that the previous episodes this season HAVE dealt with the crew as actual persons with hurts and flaws and various qualities. Unification III turned them into a bunch of muppets.

I hadn't thought about it until this comment, but one thing which was majorly lacking from this episode - which the season did well up until this point - was having side conversations between the characters which didn't exist primary to serve the plot. That's why it feels like a step back - nearly everything that is said is just to move along either Michael's A plot or Tilly's B plot.

The closest thing to human interaction that we get is Saru with the Ni'Var President (which was absolutely the high point of the episode - Saru's got some game!)
 
Only if one has a problem with it to being with.
I don't have a problem with it.

I'm not watching the show to evaluate every single decision the writers make.
I'm watching it to enjoy where they decide to take the characters and the final results the writers chose to make.
You hyper-realist evaluations essentially destroy any joy that might come from just going along for the ride.
That of course is your option, but it seems to me like a whole lot of wasted time and energy over something that none of us have a say in.
:shrug:

I can enjoy something even when I notice its flaws. And occasionally something comes across that is just so unreservedly awesome I have literally no critiques of it (like say Into the Spiderverse - that movie still amazes the fuck out of me, and I don't even like comic books).
 
I wouldn't use IMDb reviews as a reflection of the "general public". It's a very small portion of the audience which rates an episode on IMDb, and an even smaller portion which goes on to write a review.

A substantial portion of the written IMDb reviews for each Disco episode are negative, even the episodes which have high overall ratings. It's mostly a core of hate-watchers (or non-watchers) who rush to bash each episode.

Just have a look at the Forget Me Not reviews as an example - a substantial portion of them (a third when I looked soon after the episode) were transphobic, and many had little to do with the episode itself.



I find it much better here than elsewhere for the most part, though that may be due to my ignore list. I've stopped discussing it on Reddit because of the constant negativity. It's one thing to dislike portions of a show - I had issues with this episode - but it gets tedious when it's the same people just constantly hating on the show.
Internet Morons' Dumbass Bitching?
 
Only if one has a problem with it to being with.
I don't have a problem with it.

I'm not watching the show to evaluate every single decision the writers make.
I'm watching it to enjoy where they decide to take the characters and the final results the writers chose to make.
You hyper-realist evaluations essentially destroy any joy that might come from just going along for the ride.
That of course is your option, but it seems to me like a whole lot of wasted time and energy over something that none of us have a say in.
:shrug:


That’s fair enough. For the most part I feel the same. Of course I don’t expect hyper-realism. It’s Trek FFS...!

I’m very happy to go along for the ride and, for the most part I have enjoyed Discovery for what it is.

All such fiction relies on willing suspension of disbelief and that’s absolutely fine — however, there is the possibility for a storyline choice so jarring that it pulls you out of the moment and makes you think WTF? What? Really?! Why?!

Characters are allowed to make apparently “dumb” or “unwise” choices, that’s in the nature of story-telling. Equally, this is not about unexpected twists and turns in the story or character arcs; handled well, those are the hallmark of good writing. This is about writers setting up situations or having characters make choices or take actions that just make little or no sense in-universe.

That kind of thing can quite abruptly yank you out of the story while you are watching or reading — and that strikes me as poor writing. I fully appreciate that this is a very subjective response and we all have very different thresholds for things that might do this to us.

Look, for what it’s worth, I’m really NOT a Discovery-hater and I didn’t go into this episode with any negative preconceptions. In fact, I just wanted to sit down and enjoy watching the next episode of season three. Sure, some of the Vulcan-Romulan stuff was a bit ham-fisted and shoe-horning in momma Burnham to boot was more than a little contrived (not to mention the unnecessary back-reference to Picard) but, you know what, Trek stories have always had small-universe-syndrome; things that should have evolved over several episodes have always been rushed because they’re trying to get everything into the 45 to 50 minutes of an episode, some plot points just are, frankly a bit twee or a bit contrived (eye-rollingly so at times) but that’s fine, it is what it is and I can roll with it.

The Tilly thing however, really pulled me out of the story quite abruptly — and it seems pretty clear that is far from being an outlier opinion.

If it’s so much “wasted energy” to discuss things like that because “it’s something that none of us have a say in” then what is the point of this board? You might as well close the whole thing down now...!! :hugegrin:
 
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