That wasn't what you were saying. You're moving the goalposts after I called you out on it.
Trust me, if it annoys me too much, I will stop watching. However, I will give it a chance.
Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x04 – “Vox in Excelso”
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Trust me, if it annoys me too much, I will stop watching. However, I will give it a chance.
There appears to be a slight masochistic streak within fandoms. Despite insisting something is _____ (fill in the blank*), it gets scored at a 5 (average?
). While something is kind of "mid" and gets a 7 or 8, which I figure it would be higher than average. 
As much as I appreciate the commitment of fans sometimes things do not work for everyone. It's ok to not like everything. I swear.
As a general note @everyone: Reading over the last few pages it seems like tempers were flaring up a bit last night. That’s fine, but please keep it civil and don’t let it get personal. I’m not going to call out anyone in particular, since people on all sides were doing it. And also, I want to reiterate that this is not a place for exclusively positive opinions about the show. That said, negative opinions expressed with the inferred purpose of antagonizing posters (“I haven’t seen the episode, but I’m sure it sucks.”) are not acceptable either.
But this is not an endorsement of the flashbacks in “Vox in Excelso”, which I didn’t find particularly interesting or useful. Not to mention that I thought the way they were filmed didn’t look particularly cool. Ultimately I thought it was nice to get to see Jay-Den’s brother and their relationship, but the wandering through what I presume are Toronto forests overlaid with a grainy orange filter didn’t really do it for me. Not a deal-breaker, though.
I’ll agree with you, though, that I found it pretty stupid that the Klingons needed to be tricked into accepting the new planet via some ceremonial mock battle. However, it does track with how Klingons have previously been portrayed. They’ll talk of honor all day, but at the end of the day what actually matters to them is the appearance of honor. It’s one of the reasons why they are one of my least favorite aspects of the franchise. I only found them interesting when they were deconstructing the whole honor schtick, like through the character of B’Elanna Torres.
What also bothered me a little (and there may very well be a follow-up to this later in the show) is how the whole story of Jay-Den’s relationship to his father didn’t have a satisfactory conclusion. So over a year ago he just abandoned him on Krios. We get Lura’s interpretation that the father supposedly “recognized Jay-Den’s victory”, but I have a hard time swallowing that and found it unnecessarily cruel to abandon him as a way of saying “you do your own thing”. It still makes Jay-Den’s father look like an absolute dick, and you’re left wondering if Jay-Den tried to reach out to his family after this or speak to his father. As someone said earlier in the thread: This feels analogous to a conservative Christian father throwing out his gay son. Should we be happy in the end that the stubborn father made it?
Well, flashbacks are “show don’t tell”.
But this is not an endorsement of the flashbacks in “Vox in Excelso”, which I didn’t find particularly interesting or useful. Not to mention that I thought the way they were filmed didn’t look particularly cool. Ultimately I thought it was nice to get to see Jay-Den’s brother and their relationship, but the wandering through what I presume are Toronto forests overlaid with a grainy orange filter didn’t really do it for me. Not a deal-breaker, though.
I’ll agree with you, though, that I found it pretty stupid that the Klingons needed to be tricked into accepting the new planet via some ceremonial mock battle. However, it does track with how Klingons have previously been portrayed. They’ll talk of honor all day, but at the end of the day what actually matters to them is the appearance of honor. It’s one of the reasons why they are one of my least favorite aspects of the franchise. I only found them interesting when they were deconstructing the whole honor schtick, like through the character of B’Elanna Torres.
What also bothered me a little (and there may very well be a follow-up to this later in the show) is how the whole story of Jay-Den’s relationship to his father didn’t have a satisfactory conclusion. So over a year ago he just abandoned him on Krios. We get Lura’s interpretation that the father supposedly “recognized Jay-Den’s victory”, but I have a hard time swallowing that and found it unnecessarily cruel to abandon him as a way of saying “you do your own thing”. It still makes Jay-Den’s father look like an absolute dick, and you’re left wondering if Jay-Den tried to reach out to his family after this or speak to his father. As someone said earlier in the thread: This feels analogous to a conservative Christian father throwing out his gay son. Should we be happy in the end that the stubborn father made it?
I kinda get it - it kinda ties into the whole theme of the episode. Daddy Kraag saw Jay-Den abandoning their luddite lifestyle and anti Federation rhetoric as a betrayal, later recognising that it might actually be the best thing for Jay-Den, but unable to back down on his previous stance, he "abandons" him on Krios as a way of allowing him to join Starfleet and retain his own position of honor. Had the parents hung around, either he'd have forbidden Jay-Den to join SF, something he recognised deep down was wrong, or have had to allow him to join and thus loose his honorable position.
Yeah, there’s definitely some parallels there, you are right. I guess what leaves a sour taste in my mouth is that the episode seems to implicitly ask us to accept what Kraag Sr. was doing as alright. I wish it would have been clearer on condemning it or at the very least show Jay-Den’s rightful anger at him. I think a couple of added lines during the final scene between Jay-Den and Caleb, where Caleb asks if Jay-Den will now visit his family and he replies by saying something like “No, they know where to reach me” would have done wonders. Something that feels more like giving Jay-Den the agency to recognize that his father would need to accept him and his life choices before talking to him again.
I wonder if the Klingons were Federation members before the Burn. 'Azati Prime' seemed to imply that, though of course, that was in a different timeline.
The Last Starship states they were, that the only species left in the Milky Way not part of the Federation were the Gorn, who agreed to join at the precise moment of the Burn.
It also shows the Klingon Defence Force ships had been subsumed into Starfleet.
The Federation's peak was only 350 members, hardly the entire galactic community. I know comics aren't canon but if they say everyone bar Gorn was a member then someone didn't do background research.
From which season of Discovery is "The Last Starship"? Would like to rewatch it.
It's a comic series
The wording is, "The galaxy stands united under our banner, thousands of species united in a dream ... [snip] Only you stand alone ..."
I guess the language is loose enough, that i guess you could consider there were only 350 official members, but like Bajor and the Bolian Homeworld, hundreds/thousands more stood under Federation Protectorate status?
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