man i gotta respect prodigy for having the grandkid of the humpback whales from voyage home be a cetacean ops crew member on voyager-a that’s some real high concept legacy nonsense
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Watching Lower Decks has got us hype about Star Trek again and gradually checking out the other more recent stuff
this has led us to Discovery which uh… is very rough (at least 2 episodes in). I’m not not liking it but the vibe definitely feels off. Something about how 2017 this show feels makes it come off as even more dated than the old shows. The promise of Tig Notaro eventually showing up and some cameos from Canada’s Sweetheart David Cronenberg are a powerful lure though, I am happy to power through it till we get there
Still, not introducing what I presume will basically be the entire cast of series regulars other than the protagonist until (at least?) the third episode is…a choice?
Also I’m aware this is an extremely ancient opinion at this point but the new Klingon designs really suck. I’m not opposed to it in principle, but the facial prosthetics and costumes are so encumbering that the actors really don’t have a lot to work with. It feels kind of power rangers ish / keaton batman suit hours
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lower decks is great though. it feels so validating to watch a show that seems like it was made by people who like star trek for all of the exact same reasons i like it
also i am really glad i managed to avoid ever hearing about how one of the main characters is canonically from my home town. shout out modesto california
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Shocking how much of recent trek does not feel like this at all, like all paramount execs ever did was watch Nemesis or something and came away thinking it’s about grimdark explosions
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We need PATHOS at ALL TIMES
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someone on staff was coming up with eg drilling into tilly’s head to get the mycelium ghost out while you have anthony rapp sing space oddity — that wasn’t coming from paramount producers — but they probably like rent more than star trek, which is way worse
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525,600 light years
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the more i watch the more Discovery just reminds me of Enterprise? It’s just kind of astonishing to me that the immediate followup to Enterprise, widely considered the nadir of the Star Trek franchise, is not a total aboutface/course correction but more like… “Ok, you hated that… but… what if we did the exact same premise but it ever-so-slightly-differently… this is the greatest thing ever, right???”
I mean, I don’t hate Enterprise either, so I’m still getting something out of this, but I do find all of the big flashy aesthetic things they do to basically never work. Like I would enjoy the exact same plot/characters but filmed in the classic Star Trek TNG PBS-with-a-Budget Aesthetic just as much if not more than all of these dutch angles and flashy cgi and shiny costumes and stuff. That being said… it is still… bad…
I kind of want to find someone out there who will go to bat for Discovery S1 but still acts like Enterprise is the worst Trek thing ever. I am guessing they don’t exist but if they do … I want to study their mind…
So far the writing is just like laughably on the nose and all the Klingons sound like non-native speakers of a made up language, which is actually kind of amazing when you think about it. Like how can something fake still sound wrong? But it does. I still think the big problem is the actors just cannot emote at all under all the prosthetics and costumes, so they just sort of stand there staring at each other and read their made up language dialogue haltingly, one word at a time. I guess I am in principle not opposed to toning down the like… theatricality of TNG era Klingons, but in retrospect that is kind of a key aspect of how they are able to emote while speaking a made up language under tons of prosthetics (also the original prosthetics don’t really obscure the lower face which is a huge part of it, and the fake teeth are less obstructive). So yeah I am guessing the feeling was they wanted to make Klingons menacing again, cast aside some of the campiness for something more naturalistic. Not a horrible idea but the execution is just … not something that should have got past the screen test stage imo
oh also they look more like Remans than Klingons, which is, again, a very funny moment of Trek history to bring to mind when you’re trying to reinvent the franchise
The solution for me is to just sort of put the idea of this being a star trek show out of my mind, and think of it instead as like… a really high budget SyFy channel original or something. With that mindset it is still pretty enjoyable
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we definitely watched discovery every week up until the last season when we bailed and can’t get through the enterprise pilot. the spore drive gestures at voyager done better instead which it is not
discovery s2 is a backdoor pilot for strange new worlds which is the best new trek imo so look forward to that, but not before some truly terrible plotting with those characters
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i really do like the idea of a show that focuses on a science vessel and goes into weird territory with it, i think that part of the premise is great, just really not vibing with the ‘we are at war now… that means we need to act like assholes constantly… or in the very least have some kind of edgy ethical quandary…’
This is also mostly what Enterprise ends up being about, but tbf I think it only really starts with the 2nd season? The 1st is mostly just interminable bullshit
also i did hear that in the final season of Disco they somehow bring back the temporal cold war which is uh… not enterprise’s finest moment either. Why not remind people of stuff that is actually good!!!
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enterprise is so fun til space 9/11 yeah. love that mpreg episode
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disagree, this was a horrible idea
Klingons have always been a bit too close to orientalist stereotypes but Discovery leaning all the way into ‘lets make them a menacing racialized other that enjoys cannibalism and every other 19th century stereotype europeans made about godless heathen foreigners’ and its awful
They look like Frank Miller drawing a brown person
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Yeah I mean I think I’m definitely saying it is not executed good at all, but I can still understand the intention
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when discovery first came out my dad said that it was more obsessed with 9/11 than enterprise and, hilariously enough, felt that the portrayal of klingons was some bizarre right wing shit. Some times you can be proud of an old libertarian man
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lower decks s4 up on youtube for free if you are somehow specifically a person who has not watched season 4 and wants to watch season 4
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having already seen the clip where the senior officers all get turned into vulcans i’m not too worried but this makes it look like they’re devolving into discovery
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They’re losing containment on the gimmick episodes we’re fuckedddddddddddddd
Didn’t even bother watching season 2 because I heard it was just star trek but written by idiots and I’ve already had enough of voyager in my life
it had a musical episode 