I know a lot of you hate Major Grin but this is funny IMO. He dubbed the Imperial March theme from Star Wars on the ending when the President of Earth comes out of the shuttle. It actually works better than it should.
Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 4x13 - "Coming Home"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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It could be the funniest shit that was ever shat, but I still won't give Major Garbage a click.
When it comes to Major Grin, you should keep your opinion to yourself next time.
Yeah, that and I got a Crystalline Entity from TNG: Datalore & Silicon Avatar vibe off of the 10-C/DMA storyline.
- Massive and nigh unstoppable spaceborne object / creature able to move at high FTL speeds and which consumes planets / biomass for energy.
- Does not know that it / they are harming intelligent lifeforms with their feeding / mining.
- Has a difficult method of communications not readily handled by the universal translator and requires some effort to learn.
- Has a victim of the DMA / Crystalline Entity (Dr. Marr/Book) who lost their homeworld and family because of it and as a result seeks vengeance and to prevent it from killing again.
Or that time Discovery was harming the JahSepp in the mycelial network, never knowing the network was inhabited.
Watched the episode again last night with my wife, loved it even more second time around..! The score alone is incredible, Jeff’s put a lot of heart and soul in this, and he’s really growing as a symphonist..! Season 4 has imo truly been the most cohesive, emotional season in all of Trek, and it pains me that we will probably have to wait a year+ to see season 5….
Is he one of the racist/homophobic etc. reviewers ?
Not that I know of. His videos are mainly just trite and lazy and easily contradicted, yet are frequently cited by people who dislike the show as some sort of incontrovertible proof of its terribleness, usually while just making a drive-by post of the video with no additional content of their own added.
They're mostly harmless compared to the worst of the YouTube commentators, it's just become such a cliche of some people tossing a Major Grin video into the middle of a discussion like a grenade and then yelling "STD suxx!" as they run away that people have understandably developed a negative reaction to them.
Not sure where all the Major Grin hate comes from.
And I don't love Major Grin or anything and I disagree with his most of his Trek reviews but I found that one video to be fun.
To be clear, that was not my intent in posting the video. I am not a Discovery "hater". My post did not say anything about Discovery "sucks". I just thought that one satire with Star Wars surprised me that it was fun.
I actually agree that most of Major Grin's videos are shit. I do watch his reviews and I disagree with most of them although occasionally, he makes a good point. But a lot of his nitpicks are dumb IMO.
Oh, no, that comment wasn't directed at you, I was just answering the poster's question. Sorry, I should have been more clear. There has been a rash of people posting Major Grin videos in the way I described, but that's not what you were doing, so you're all good.
A perfunctory ending to a perfunctory season.
Predictable til the end, everything is exactly as everyone anticipated in episode 2 or so. Future watching guides will say of season 4 "skip to season 5".
Both Tarka and the 10c are suddenly easily convinced with a couple of words that what they are doing is wrong. Book apparently dies but…Did anyone REALLY believe he hadn't been saved by the 10c? He is then given the Berlusconi treatment (a few weeks of social services, then all is forgiven). The general goes the route of the "noble sacrifice to atone for her crimes"…And doesn't even actually die, that she committed betrayal is easily forgiven. The 10c disable the field and that's it, who cares about the planets they destroyed? Tarka may even have reached the Nexus.
I strongly resent the message that "all love ends in grief": love doesn't have to end at all.
Also "what am I watching at": the VFX by now are so abstract I don't know why do they bother.
6. A rushed, predictable, baring passable ending to a boring season.
Predictable til the end, everything is exactly as everyone anticipated in episode 2 or so. Future watching guides will say of season 4 "skip to season 5".
Both Tarka and the 10c are suddenly easily convinced with a couple of words that what they are doing is wrong. Book apparently dies but…Did anyone REALLY believe he hadn't been saved by the 10c? He is then given the Berlusconi treatment (a few weeks of social services, then all is forgiven). The general goes the route of the "noble sacrifice to atone for her crimes"…And doesn't even actually die, that she committed betrayal is easily forgiven. The 10c disable the field and that's it, who cares about the planets they destroyed? Tarka may even have reached the Nexus.
I strongly resent the message that "all love ends in grief": love doesn't have to end at all.
Also "what am I watching at": the VFX by now are so abstract I don't know why do they bother.
6. A rushed, predictable, baring passable ending to a boring season.
I realized a few days after watching that someone heading into Season 5 without watching Season 4 would only be confused by the following things:
- Earth is back in the Federation
- Book's ship is gone
- Tilly and Gray are gone (but neither of these had to do with the season arc).
Before the release of season 1, when they were teasing that it was going to be about a mentioned-but-never-explored event from Trek past, I was hoping for the Sheliak. It was right there in the timeline! In "Ensigns Of Command", they mention the Federations last encounter with the Sheliak was 2255, and "The Vulcan Hello" was set in 2256.
Well, it's of course impossible to say what factors in season 4 will be important in season 5, before they've even started shooting season 5, but I don't think this is a fair characterization of season 4 at all. I actually did a full rewatch of season 4 this week and it is jam-packed.
I don't agree with the premise that every season must have huge changes in order to be a good story, but looking at season 4 -- it's a story about restoring the shattered Federation. There have been very few seasons in the entire history of this franchise that showed us changes in the larger Trekverse as big as that one.
I was so relieved they took the year to tell it, too. That was a big concern of mine at the end of season 3, that we'd skip over the process and just be back to full-strength-Federation at the start of season 4. They did so much more dealing with post-Burn issues than I would have expected, and I was so glad to see it.
And there was also big development with Zora, Burnham as captain, Saru/T'Rina, Burnham and Book's relationship, etc...
Is it that bad that it has no future ramifications? It strikes me as far closer to episodic style, though season long rather singular episode, where the ramifications of an episode mean dick all to the next episode, for the most part.
I mean, there was a time skip between Seasons 3 and 4 already, and some stuff happened during that period (like Stamets getting over his anger with Michael. There was also a time skip between Seasons 1 and 2 of Picard, with big changes to the status quo.
I left out the discussion of Book because we don't know what they'll do there for Season 5. Will he be back from "community service" or not? Depends upon what David Ajala wants I suppose.
Some of the other stuff, the writing was on the wall regarding already. Saru and T'Rina started flirting in Season 3 for example. Zora started acting more human in that season as well. I don't think the season 5 relationships will be so different that it would have been unrecognizable in a "time skip" scenario.
To be clear, I'm not really saying necessarily that this is a story that didn't deserve to be told on its own merits, only that they didn't really leave a "hook" in there for the following season to flow from.
YMMV, but for me, yes. I like serialization in that it can allow a long-form story to be told over an entire show, or at least a long-form character arc. If we're just going to have unrelated episodic seasons thrown out, I'd rather just have episodic period - mostly because I don't think the quality control is that much higher with season-only serialization, and I'd rather have (as an example) 40% of episodes having decent payoffs versus 40% of the seasons.
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Good to know.
I think this is Discovery's moving towards the vein of TNG and such, where seasons are episodes. Consequences will be diminished because the seasons are largely self-contained.
All of these issues come down to not having the time, due to the pacing of the season, to properly deal with these issues.
Your first point would have been a great thing to explore in this episode. If DIS could have given more than ½ episode to exploring this new species/civilization, we could have had some real development of them, some real exploration of their fears of destruction and loss from their earlier planet, what they have evolved to since then, etc. But we weren’t given enough time, so we just have to make do with coming up with all these totally unsupported justifications ourselves.
As for your second point about the galactic barrier, exactly! I had thought, prior to seeing the finale, that the 10-C had likely created the galactic barrier, to further insulate themselves from any threat from the galaxy. It would explain their extreme energy needs, their fear of destruction, and it would explain the really stupid concept of the barrier in the first place.
Also, was anyone else annoyed that the barrier wasn’t anything at all like in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”? That it didn’t have any similar characteristics or effects, and that on top of that, the whole physics of the bubbles of space is a laughable concept? (I haven’t read the commentary thread for that episode, so I don’t know if everyone laughed it out of the room or if everyone accepted the technobabble as is.)
Yeah, I guess it could have all gone that way, but there was no evidence presented that that is the case. Would have been nice to get some actual explanation/exploration in the show.
I have to agree with the idea that the pacing was terrible. I do agree that Discovery writers are terrible at serialized pacing, but I wouldn’t restrict it to fast-paced or slow paced, just any serialization at all. As you said, the more episodic they get, the better they are.
Sure, in the past DIS overplotted things such that there was no time to even address the concepts being introduced, or justify the plot points they were creating or the conclusions characters come to. But slowing the story arc down this season didn’t help them at all. They didn’t give their story more time, they didn’t really address any of the complex ideas (which basically all came in the last two episodes), they just spaced out the revelations about the DMA/10-C with a bunch of ill-timed gab sessions and pointless “casino” planet episodes. I am constantly saying, “slow down, I just want more scenes of people sitting around a conference table discussing things” both here in DIS and in PIC (season 1 at least), but not in the middle of a climactic battle or action sequence. If the writers set up a suspenseful ticking clock, that is not the time to have two characters go off and have a discussion about how they misinterpreted each other earlier. That part is supposed to come after.
In S1/S2, smashing two large story arcs into each season didn’t work; in S4 extending one story arc out into a full season, with boring, ill-timed character scenes also didn’t work. And smashing all the real revelations and developments into 60 of the last 90 minutes, and undercooking those due to lack of time, didn’t work either.
Like other posters, I don’t have any problem with the themes of this season or the themes of DIS as a series overall. I like to explore these concepts. I just think Discovery has done them poorly.
To do them well, it helps to tie them to a given plotline – have some crisis that tests our characters or their beliefs or shows them in contrast to others. It challenges the characters and allows them to explore and grow. Without this, you just get a bunch of isolated scenes of characters starkly spouting their feelings, hugging it out, and moving on with no stakes or consequences (see the Gray storyline).
That is the problem with relying on serialization. Having a serialized show set in a more contemporary setting (like The Wire or even The Sopranos) is a little easier to do because you just have the characters living their lives and dealing with their friends, enemies, and personal issues while doing their jobs or “jobs”. But in Trek, that approach doesn’t really work when you jobs are “stop this crazy space virus or dream vampire or weird rift in the next 12 hours” or “stop the destruction of all known reality within the next year”.
You can’t really go, “time out with the space vampire because Tilly needs to have a chat with her mom about how her mom disliked her hairstyle in 10th grade” without it being pace-disrupting. Now, if you had a standalone episode where Tilly’s mom had to come on board because she was the local expert on space vampires, and then they had their scene about hairstyles, it would fit. [These are not always the best-written, which is how we got episodes like with Data’s Mom (ok) or Worf’s Brother (bleh). But when done well, they work: an episode with Riker’s former commander (The Pegasus) or O’Brien’s (The Wounded).] But in a season-long arc about a DMA, not everyone’s personal bugaboos will be directly connected. The Discovery writers still need to shoehorn in those personal development stories, they just don’t have anything to hang them on, so they get put in even if they don’t fit well.
I agree. Have arcs and developments when needed, and just have them be “them” when needed. Which is why you used to have ensemble shows with “a Data episode” or “a Doctor episode” where the other character would just be there as normal (but you never really had “a Harry episode” J).
Agreed, all of this could have used a lot more development and screentime to really explore and understand. If you are going to do a season-long arc, why only give about as much handwavey depth as you would the normal alien-of-the-week when you have the potential for so much more? DS9 was able to do this with many cultures because they had series arcs, even though they largely didn’t have serialization: Bajoran, Ferengi, Dominion, Cardassian.
BTW, did anyone object to the retcon of isolytic weapons using isolynium? I haven’t read the episode threads for those episodes, but that was just about the stupidest technobabble retcon I have seen in Trek in a while. Not every weapon is named after a singular element it uses. Chemical weapons are not dependent on “chemicleanium”; biological weapons are not banned because they use “biologium”; nuclear weapons are not dangerous because they contain “nucleanium”. And it wouldn’t have even changed the storyline one iota to make it that they had to go find an information dealer who owned plans on how to build the long-banned and almost forgotten isolytic weapons. So stupid.
Have to agree with you on all your points. So many missed opportunities. And the DIS crew definitely still don’t have a good handle on using the video wall technology.
Man, I do not find Kovich to be interesting characterwise at all. Sure he is a little different from everyone else because of how he is portrayed: not by an actual actor and with unusual (and I assume personally directed by Cronenberg) wardrobe. But to me he is so ill defined as a character that I can’t like him, and he isn’t even different or disruptive enough to be an impish character (like Q) or someone with a truly vague backstory but with a fun demeanor (like Reno was in her first episode).
I too liked this finale better than the entire rest of the season, even with all its many flaws.
And I have said it before, but I will say it again, Discovery has rounded off all the interesting corners to its characters: Burnham’s human in Vulcan clothes; Stamets’s grumpiness; Lorca’s damaged veteran; Saru’s coward in a hero’s job.
While season 1, 2, and (to a lesser degree) 3 had high-points and some very low points, seasons 3 and 4 improved some elements (production, production design, ship designs, Star Trek ideals), but also averaged out a bunch of other stuff (some really boring side plots, overly direct dialog (“I feel X”, “sorry you feel X”, <hugs>), elimination of interesting character traits) such that now I care a lot less. This is the first time I have checked out mid-season on Trek since ENT season 2.
Maybe I need to rewatch it, but I didn't come away with that impression (and I binged episodes 7-13 after not keeping up for a while). There was a little bit on rebuilding the Federation at the start with premiere's opening sequence with the Butterly people, then the one episode with the negotiations between Nivar, Earth, and the Federation, and then the tiny and unimportant piece with all the delegates meeting in "But to Connect..." (we didn't even get names or lines for most of the delates in the mission to meet 10-C), but the actual events largely developed in between seasons 3 and 4 or offscreen in Season 4. The rebuilding the Federation occurred in the background, largely unaddressed by our characters, while they really dealt with the DMA.
As for changes to the Trek-verse, I do think the only comparable one would be season 7 of DS9. Cardassia destroyed, almost the whole of the Federation conquered, Romulans working with the Federation as allies, and then the end of the war that had threatened conquest of all the Alpha/Beta quadrant civs. But that's war for you. Made the Federation/Klingon war in DIS S1 feel like it was happening only in the background.
It really drove me nuts how during Season 3 Stamets slowly built up resentment towards Burnham and then...they just made up offscreen between Seasons 3 and 4. Why the hell even set up a change to the status quo when you just erase it all at the end? Someone actually disliking Michael (and having to work towards forgiveness) would be good dramatic potential for the season.
Again, they overlearned the lessons from Season 1. People griped about the show being too "dark" and everyone hating one another. Now they all just love and support one another 100% of the time, and if someone makes a nasty comment, by the end of the episode they have to own up to needing therapy.
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