Sweet fancy Moses, let's take it down a notch. Sheesh.
Starfleet Academy General Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Tuskin38
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Bad writing on DISCO...
1. The meandering of the season arcs.
2. The end of said arcs (with the exception of season 4, but most of the entire season was such a slog to get through) being either bad or lackluster at best.
3. The characters, with extremely few exceptions, not really coming alive.
4. The constant shrink sessions in the middle of emergencies. Can't take these Starfleet officers seriously as professionals.
I've got more, but that should give you at least a starting point on what I'm talking about. I like being surprised by shows, taking risks, etc. But DISCO just couldn't hold my interest with their stories, and the characters were written rather hollow. (Cheap tricks to get you to feel for them instead of letting the audience feel the connection, for lack of a better term, organically.)
1. The meandering of the season arcs.
2. The end of said arcs (with the exception of season 4, but most of the entire season was such a slog to get through) being either bad or lackluster at best.
3. The characters, with extremely few exceptions, not really coming alive.
4. The constant shrink sessions in the middle of emergencies. Can't take these Starfleet officers seriously as professionals.
I've got more, but that should give you at least a starting point on what I'm talking about. I like being surprised by shows, taking risks, etc. But DISCO just couldn't hold my interest with their stories, and the characters were written rather hollow. (Cheap tricks to get you to feel for them instead of letting the audience feel the connection, for lack of a better term, organically.)
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That's the TrekBBS Difference™.
With a touch of Retsyn™.
I love the majority of the Disco characters, save Lorcs and Stamets and Mirror Georgiou. Detmer and Culber and Burnham probably round out the top three for me. Bryce and Owo are ok and really loved the movie night plot.
Brian Brophy wearing a sombrero riding inside the funhouse turbo-lift would be the Trek BBS trifecta.
I really liked Lorca... until they did his character a huge disservice by making him from the Mirror Universe.
Stamets was good at the start... but he lost too much of his bite, for lack of a better term, as the show went on.
I actually liked Mirror Georgiou, though I preffered Captain Georgiou. A mistake to kill her off.
Detmer was hardly given anything, and the little we got was part of the 'best' season, season 3. (Plus, she was just unceremoniiusly written out, along with Owo.)
Burnham... total disagree. Just not a good character, for various reasons that I have mentioned many times.
We agree on Culber, at least. Good from beginning to end of the series.
Saru, to me, was the MVP of that show. And it's not even close.
No, the writing was just really bad.
Take Season 2's Red Angel plot, the writers completely forgot about the first set of flashes that started the whole search in the first place and had Discovery decide to travel into the future after the threat of Control was destroyed.
Or Season 3's Time Travel Ban, The Burn, and Federation Collapse plots, the first was nonsensical because you can't ban time travel without time travel, the second was stupid because of the scale, and the third required the writers ignore all the non-dilithium based was of traveling at Warp.
Saru was ok most of the time. Season 1 was roughest plus some parts of season 3.
I actually like that Detmer and Owo got written off. It felt the most TOS to me.
Burnham I'll never understand the hate for. It's absolutely alien to me.
My own DSC complaints, from vague memory:
- The entire Ash Tyler/Voq character didn't seem to make sense, nor did the writers appear to have thought the transformation from Klingon into human through. Didn't seem to go anywhere, despite being the main character's love interest for a while.
- Lazy and uninteresting reuse of the Mirror Universe that adds nothing to "Mirror, Mirror" nor brings anything new (and yes, I would level the same criticsm at DS9 even moreso)
- Cynical, often "deconstructed", reuses of legacy ideas like Mudd (again, yes, this is far from the first Star Trek series to do this)
- Control was too much of an absolute non-entity to work as a season-long villain, and an even bigger issue, they kill SUPER-LELAND (lol) and Burnham still goes through the portal... why? Burnham, mate, we just fixed it. Turn around, come back
- Mirror Georgiou is fun and Michelle Yeoh rocks but the character just doesn't work, at least in the seasons I've watched (1, 2, a small part of 3); she's a ridiculous comic book character - which is great - trapped in a very dour show, and she never comes to life in the way she could.
On top of that it mostly is subjective tonal choices:
- the first season doesn't really retain anything that appeals to me in Star Trek and instead feels more like a dull generic military sci-fi (again, yes, like post-season-4 DS9 and some of the films)
- the characters talk and behave in a way designed to model a certain kind of contemporary American psychotherapy, which I find alienating and unrelatable as someone not immersed in that culture (this, I think, is a huge factor that repels people from the show, and often at the heart of what people are getting at)
- the serialised model doesn't work for me in DSC, it just lets bad ideas fester and gives the writers even more opportunities to fuck up the pacing (S2 was better in that regard, at least for the first half)
To say something nice about it, uhh... SMG is a fantastic actor, though I felt the material never served her well. In S2's "New Eden" you can briefly feel how Burnham really could have worked as a character with the interesting trait of being a human raised on Vulcan; unable to fully embrace the Vulcan philosophy due to her lack of telepathy but still engaged enough with it that she offers a different embodiment of that ideal.
- The entire Ash Tyler/Voq character didn't seem to make sense, nor did the writers appear to have thought the transformation from Klingon into human through. Didn't seem to go anywhere, despite being the main character's love interest for a while.
- Lazy and uninteresting reuse of the Mirror Universe that adds nothing to "Mirror, Mirror" nor brings anything new (and yes, I would level the same criticsm at DS9 even moreso)
- Cynical, often "deconstructed", reuses of legacy ideas like Mudd (again, yes, this is far from the first Star Trek series to do this)
- Control was too much of an absolute non-entity to work as a season-long villain, and an even bigger issue, they kill SUPER-LELAND (lol) and Burnham still goes through the portal... why? Burnham, mate, we just fixed it. Turn around, come back
- Mirror Georgiou is fun and Michelle Yeoh rocks but the character just doesn't work, at least in the seasons I've watched (1, 2, a small part of 3); she's a ridiculous comic book character - which is great - trapped in a very dour show, and she never comes to life in the way she could.
On top of that it mostly is subjective tonal choices:
- the first season doesn't really retain anything that appeals to me in Star Trek and instead feels more like a dull generic military sci-fi (again, yes, like post-season-4 DS9 and some of the films)
- the characters talk and behave in a way designed to model a certain kind of contemporary American psychotherapy, which I find alienating and unrelatable as someone not immersed in that culture (this, I think, is a huge factor that repels people from the show, and often at the heart of what people are getting at)
- the serialised model doesn't work for me in DSC, it just lets bad ideas fester and gives the writers even more opportunities to fuck up the pacing (S2 was better in that regard, at least for the first half)
To say something nice about it, uhh... SMG is a fantastic actor, though I felt the material never served her well. In S2's "New Eden" you can briefly feel how Burnham really could have worked as a character with the interesting trait of being a human raised on Vulcan; unable to fully embrace the Vulcan philosophy due to her lack of telepathy but still engaged enough with it that she offers a different embodiment of that ideal.
That's due to the massive reworking of the season's story arc they had to do after showrunners Berg and Harberts were fired following production of episode 205. When you redo an entire season like that, it's almost inevitable you can't paper over every crack.
1) The ban was likely enacted after measures were taken to ensure time travel was made difficult. Nothing nonsensical about that. You're just not thinking fourth-dimensionally.
2) The Burn is still stupid, but the scale of the event is not one of the reasons why.
3) The writers didn't ignore the alternate methods of warp drive, even mentioning the Vulcans had been working on an alternate, but it failed due to political reasons. Perhaps try paying attention to the show.
Isn’t there a DISCO Forum?
The Sphere data aboard Discovery was the driver behind taking the ship away, not Leland/Control.
At the same time, the Red Angel plot was a self-fulfilling time loop. You can't have the season happen without the ship heading off to the future.
What is cynical about it? I never followed this. Mudd is a scoundrel who isn't worth the print on his record.
At least we agree on this.
Right. The first time we meet him he's trafficking women, the second time we meet him he threatens to abandon the entire crew of the Enterprise on the android planet, and the third time we meet him (TAS) he is selling mind altering narcotics. Hardly a lovable rogue.
It's a "darker" reimagining of an existing character in a way that was, perhaps, designed to signal the attitude of Discovery compared to TOS (in the same way the character of Ellen Landry exists basically to signal to the viewer that Starfleet in DSC is gruffer and less cuddly than in TOS, and then to get gored).
The issue isn't that Mudd couldn't feasibly behave like that in-universe, but rather why the writers chose to revive the character in that way as a creative decision. To use DS9 as an example again, it's like how they write that Kirk's call for compassion in the Mirrorverse, and MirrorSpock's heeding of that call, resulted in total disaster. That could happen in-universe, but as a piece of writing, it can feel like the writers trying to broadcast "look, we're darker and more mature than the old stuff!", which will appeal to some viewers but annoy others.
Possibly. We weren't in the writers room, so we can't say for sure.
Shit - not only is Mudd sex trafficking in his first episode, he's more than willing to let the Enterprise and its crew go down in flames in order to secure his deal with the miners on Rigel. And I have a feeling his line about the original Captain of his ship having died really meant he killed him instead.
Discovery didn't make Mudd a dark character - he was dark from the first fucking time we saw him.
When someone says this is they think, they are expressing an opinion, not putting words in your mouth. You need to calm down. You are free to express your own opinion as well, as long as you stay civil, and you don't attack a poster for expressing their own opinion.
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Yes, but again, you can wonder why they chose to deploy the character in the way they did - same as why they chose to depict Burnham's treatment by Starfleet while imprisoned, and then the response given to her by Discovery's security team, in the way they did. Is there precedent in TOS for Starfleet security being gung-ho hardasses? There is, but the question is what the writers intended to convey by presenting it in such a central way in a new series.
I mean, surely you agree Discovery was trying to carve its own distinct tone separate from TOS, and that it expressed this in part via its use (and reframing) of legacy material - that's part of its intended appeal, right?
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