So, we all agree that they introduced the the name Booker as a title to be passed down to set up there being a Booker the Sixth in the near future?
Or is it just a red hering?
Or is it just a red hering?
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x12 - "Species 10-C"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
I have a feeling that once all is said and done, very deep inside this 13-episode story arc, somewhere there will be a really great 8 episode story arc.
well that was kind of disappointing.
they keep padding this out
they build up tension then ruin it by having Burnham and Saru go walk away for a long quiet talk and a pointless bit of screaming. Goodbye plot urgency. We hardly knew ya!
Book went from a cool interesting character to just being a sad dooped schmuck with a big cat and a magic ship that can now literally fly through plot holes. They just need to kill him off now. He can't get any credibility back next season.
I liked the communication protocol bits, though the whole thing was done better by Arrival, which they are borrowing heavily from, at least in spirit. I'm sure we'll get to the whole "10cc doesn't perceive time as we do, and that is why Saru is his own grandpa!" next week.. or episode 48 of this season..whatever it is. Feels like it.
The only important question this episode leaves: what happened to the Dot robots? Do they get them back?
they keep padding this out
they build up tension then ruin it by having Burnham and Saru go walk away for a long quiet talk and a pointless bit of screaming. Goodbye plot urgency. We hardly knew ya!
Book went from a cool interesting character to just being a sad dooped schmuck with a big cat and a magic ship that can now literally fly through plot holes. They just need to kill him off now. He can't get any credibility back next season.
I liked the communication protocol bits, though the whole thing was done better by Arrival, which they are borrowing heavily from, at least in spirit. I'm sure we'll get to the whole "10cc doesn't perceive time as we do, and that is why Saru is his own grandpa!" next week.. or episode 48 of this season..whatever it is. Feels like it.
The only important question this episode leaves: what happened to the Dot robots? Do they get them back?
Luckily I'm a video editor, so I can create that "eight episode" version if I want... but unfortunately, I'd never be able to put it up if I did because I wouldn't want Copyright Strikes against me. But, in a different world, yeah.
You'd need to get to the DMA Controller and get yourself to that idyllic reality where 8 episode story arc with great plots and no inconsistences, etc....shows are common.
Really great main plot that gets dragged down by the terrible Booker/Tarka stuff.
still, I’ll go with an 8.
I really hope Tarka gets some strong comeuppance and not because he’s a good bad guy but because we’ve been subjected to his terrible storyline. I don’t want any understanding, we can rehab him BS. Send him to the mirror verse to be dissected by Captain Killy or something.
still, I’ll go with an 8.
I really hope Tarka gets some strong comeuppance and not because he’s a good bad guy but because we’ve been subjected to his terrible storyline. I don’t want any understanding, we can rehab him BS. Send him to the mirror verse to be dissected by Captain Killy or something.
V
Vale
Guest
The writers decided we didn't need to see that scene, it was much more important for us to see Burnham and Saru wander off and scream at each other for a bit instead.
Book: spending years as a successful courier, you develop a sense of who you can trust.
later that day
Book: Tarka, why are all these online gambling and dirty webcam charges on my space bank account?
Tarka: I am cultivating contacts to help us defeat the people who killed your planet. You wanted that right?
Book: Oh, alright. While we're talking, you didn't make a copy of my key and start making serious modifications to my ship which could lock me out and make force fields that would hurt me, did you?
Tarka: <long pause>No.. wait.. oh that.. No.
Book: Alright. Cheers.
later that day
Book: Tarka, why are all these online gambling and dirty webcam charges on my space bank account?
Tarka: I am cultivating contacts to help us defeat the people who killed your planet. You wanted that right?
Book: Oh, alright. While we're talking, you didn't make a copy of my key and start making serious modifications to my ship which could lock me out and make force fields that would hurt me, did you?
Tarka: <long pause>No.. wait.. oh that.. No.
Book: Alright. Cheers.
I thought that was much better than the last couple of episodes. They even had a couple of "I can't talk about this now, I'm busy but we'll come back to it later" lines. 
Very Arrival feel to the alien communication scenes. And the more Reno, the better.
8
Very Arrival feel to the alien communication scenes. And the more Reno, the better.
8
Cleveland Booker, say hi to Dread Pirate Roberts.
This episode bored me and I jumped ahead to see the ending. They have dragged this story out, ran over it a few times, and, for good measure, gave it a good thrashing with a branch.
This episode bored me and I jumped ahead to see the ending. They have dragged this story out, ran over it a few times, and, for good measure, gave it a good thrashing with a branch.
I get why they thought they needed the extra source of conflict, and it's honestly gone better than usual, but it does feel unnecessary to me. There are plenty of legitimate stakes in this entire story, even before they put a giant target on Earth/Ni'var, just in the premise. We could have spent more time on the engaging portions if Book/Tarka weren't constantly gumming things up. Especially since Tarka was obviously a bad guy from the moment he arrived, and the Discovery crew should still be very wary of people like Lorca and Tarka.
I wasn't really strongly expecting it before, but now that they gave us his backstory it feels like they're free to write him off permanently. I think several people are going to have to make hard choices in the no-win scenario they've created.
As the story has taken shape in the last few episodes, I keep thinking it would have fixed the momentum problems a lot by having them go here first, be unable to communicate, and then go looking for answers so when they return here it's not all so out of the blue. It would make their field trip into a necessary diversion while the sword hangs over their heads instead of just a very serendipitous exploratory one, it would have given them some sense of what to be looking out for, and made this section of the season flow much more organically.
They're slowly getting better at writing these season-long arcs, but even this one still suffers from the unmotivated "characters go to B because we need them to find C" instead of "A gives the characters a reason to go to B, where they find C, something which will play into the story later". It's sometimes more subtle but still jarring. Nearly every revelation or puzzle solution this season has involved the characters deciding what the answer is, and it being correct despite being only one of many possible likely answers, solely because that was the moment the plot needed them to solve it and move on to the next beat. It's unfortunate because what they've got going on this season is really good, but there are still these bumps along the way that just didn't need to be there with a tiny bit more massaging of the episode-to-episode plotting. Fixing this would go a long way to overcoming the pacing issues that some of us have felt with the latter half of the season, because the story would no longer feel in conflict with what the characters are doing in it.
The glaring issue I have - and to be fair they have an episode left to resolve things; I'm only going off previous pedal to the metal Disco finales - is the fact 10-C were seemingly unaware of the damage the DMA was causing. They asked why the isolytic weapon destroyed the DMA. We responded with "Our atmosphere + DMA = terror". 10-C's response? Great sadness.
Now, 10-C had a bridging language ready to deploy, presumably because they've met other lifeforms, or at least were prepared to meet them (in the unlikely event they've never met another species). It's also reasonable to assume they have a concept of solar systems and biological evolution, given they originated on a planet and live on planets within the Hyperfield.
Yet, are we to believe they parked up by a galaxy, dragged a 5 light year-wide mining rig through it and were oblivious to the civilisations they were wrecking? Science Guy tried to give them an out with the Kardashev nonsense. Look, even if they weren't actively scanning for other lifeforms in their mining operations, it would stand to reason they would at least consider the possibility of potential civilisations in the path of their rig - if we are to believe they have empathy and don't want to murder billions of sentients, that is.
As I said, they have finale left to fill in the blanks. But they've already written things back the front with everyone assuming the universal translators wouldn't work with 10-C, when there was zero indication this would be the case. If the writers think they've provided an explanation in this episode, they haven't.
The communication concept was interesting, but I still don't give a crap about the crew. I don't care if they live or if they are getting blown up in the next episode. Chances be they won't, because somehow this show got a fifth season greenlit.
The only thing I liked about this episode was Jet Reno ... best acted role in this episode and maybe the whole season.
The only thing I liked about this episode was Jet Reno ... best acted role in this episode and maybe the whole season.
I suppose what we're supposed to believe is that having evolved on a gas giant, they may have pre-supposed that that was the only place advanced life could develop. For all we know they could be avoiding planets they believe are life-bearing.
It would seem odd that an advanced race wouldn't be able to think outside the box - since we can conceive of life on Jovian worlds - but it may be their psychology is different. And perhaps they have always been trapped on the far side of the Galactic Barrier, and with the sparse stars of the halo, they just didn't have enough experience with diverse solar systems to go by.
I don't find it odd at all. We have debates on sentience on our own planet.
Given the way things have worked so far, I suspect this was all the explanation we're going to get, and it was meant to be a good one. It's nonsense, because that's simply not how things work, but I think we're meant to accept that being Very Advanced Life also makes them ignorant to the point of total blindness. Being beyond our level of understanding doesn't necessarily also put them beyond understanding things happening at our level.
The repetition of the remarks about the translator are irritating, because there's a big difference between "we can't know if we'll be able to translate it" and "we know for sure it won't work", but they seemed to be using the latter in place of the former more than once despite knowing literally nothing about 10-C. The laughable part is that they still figured out how to communicate with 10-C in a matter of minutes (was it supposed to be hours? Still...), and in a way that should be fairly programmable for the UT. Things are perhaps a bit more complicated than usual linguistic communication, but not by much, and it seems likely that at least some of the alien races this far-future Federation has encountered were similarly atypical.
I really enjoyed this one despite these flaws, they don't break the episode for me, but I would like to see this aspect of the show improve. They're clearly making a genuine effort to do some more sci-fi. In all fairness, this is a hard thing to write when you want to have expert characters more knowledgeable than you are. They have a science advisor, but it seems that only goes so far when they've got their minds set on a specific story beat. Not everyone is good at seeing how getting these little things right is better and more stable for your world-building in the long term, and often gives you some amazing springboards for creative storytelling that stands up to scrutiny and doesn't threaten to break the suspension of disbelief.
It is an interesting episode for sure. Altough I only gave it 7/10 which is on the lower spectrum of my Discovery ratings, I still was fascinated by it somehow. Most of the episode consists of our characters speaking technobabble... No, it's more math... Can we say mathbabble? Anyway, I liked hiw they little by little come up with how to communicate with this new species, only for Tarka to once again foil their plans. The cliffhanger ending was there to left me waiting for another week, I hope the finale is really something.
We have yet to venture to a single other star system, and yet plenty of scientists and science fiction writers have hypothesized about many different possible biospheres.
Maybe the 10c are just kind of stupid, or the inbred foolish remains of what HAD been a bright species.
A species capable of traversting incredible distances like the 10cc without even the slightest clue there might be other types of being out there (wait till they get a view of the Crystalline entity or the Tholians) makes them seem more stupid on a functional level then the Pakleds. At least Pakleds are capable of understanding that there are many different sentience species and that they have value (they define value differently than WE do but still).
The way 10cc handled the loss of their previous mining expedition kind of demonstrates this too. Tarka destroyed it. Instead of investigating what happened and why, they just sent another one more powerful. Were they not even curious? Whatever their super brain power is used for, it's not very practical. That lack of curiosity and willingness to wipe out chunks of the galaxy without a thought makes them extremely dangerous. Probably means Tarka realistically had the best plan of action, though they'll resolve it somehow next week.
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