Black and gold is greater than Frank Miller but yeah I cannot imagine this is handled with grace
Also 300 still rules Frank’s politics be damned.
Tulpa I can’t believe you left idly chatting with me playing Talos Principle just to watch this bullshit
I make terrible mistakes when it comes to trek
Oh good Lord.
The writing is all kinds of terrible, even by modern trek standards. Wracking my brain and…nope, not a single likable character. Not even one.
Good to see Guillermo Navarro get a gig though. The first part was pretty despite the Mandatory Lens Flare.
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I actually thought doug jones’s character was ok even if his species explanation was total nonsense
And I’ll watch michelle yeoh in anything, too bad she’s only a guest star
Don’t get me wrong, I like both of those actors but the characters were just so thinly written.
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yeah, agreed, though I think given time maybe doug jones will end up the standard “weird character that is the single redeeming feature of a bad star trek” (The Doctor on Voyager, Phlox on Enterprise)
Holy shit is this the first star trek without an important/relevant medical officer?
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not sure but the guy in medical looked like the dude who played Jack Donaghy’s secretary on 30 Rock? could come back more.
despite sharing some complaints in this thread,
im still pretty interested in the direction this goes but like i don’t get why were they so set on making this firmly set in the Original Show Timeline when it seems tailor made to just be a prequel to the Abrams-verse?
i am really getting some Doctor Who-reboot vibes here for some reason.
reading through the Wikipedia leads me to really wanna know more about what happened with Fuller’s involvement & eventual departure. (also apparently Jonathan Frakes is directing an episode?)
i should watch more older Trek series i haven’t watched yet
It’s amazing how Phlox is basically Neelix But Not Shitty and by virtue of this is the best character on the show instead of the worst.
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from what I understand (and I’m not a huge Fuller fan but I can respect the guy for basically maintaining individuality in a very homogeneous tv landscape) he had a lot of other projects he was interested in and there was more than a little executive meddling on star trek that meant he couldn’t exactly pursue his ambitions (an anthology show exploring different corners of the trek universe)
I just assumed that it was intended as an Abramsverse prequel, because that’s certainly the vibe i got.
Realizing that any Star Trek Discovery Project I would write or record would have to start with 1700 layers of context including like Grace Lee Whitney’s sexual assault on the set of Charlie X and subsequent firing, both possibly by Roddenberry, Roddenberry’s general extreme horniness (Dr. Crusher with “the natural walk of a Striptease Queen” what a fucking character description. Troi considered with three boobs, the bald lady from sex planet on the motion picture, etc, etc,etc) and how that has informed the “sexiness” of the entire franchise and it’s treatment of female characters until now, the original Klingons’ weird orientalist Flash Gordon fu-manchu shit, how race and sexual orientation is treated in-universe vs the representations on screen, the history of prestige drama opening title sequences, Brian Fuller’s work on Voyager, the differences between individual canons and what elements are randomly discarded or contradicted already in-universe, the entire wild marketing lead up to the show and also the existence of The Orville side by side in this post firefly post farscape post galactica tv world and man it would never fuckin’ end what a nightmare i can barely write this paragraph
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I was just talking about this with another trek fan wrt how horrible the new klingons look and apparently are in Discovery (haven’t watched it yet). Like, even though the klingons were so racist in their appearance, because they were a gigantic cold war caricature, all of the stories that involve them are infused with this kind of gentlemanly battlefield ethics and honor that has not really been possible since the cold war.
Like, this is also a pretty silly stereotype that has perhaps rightfully fallen out of use–that, despite being on opposing sides, enemies at war have more in common with one another than they do with civilians or whatever, so there’s this weird kind of camaraderie where you recognize that if circumstances were different you would be allies rather than enemies. And yet it still seems so much more intelligent than just making up some kind of radical faction of bloodthirsty monsters so you don’t have to worry about creating any sense of equivalence between the two sides.
This is of course also the thing that is kind of turned on its head in cold war espionage stories post Le Carre, in which the spies recognize they have more in common with one another than their respective countries, but this gives you a kind of nihilistic sense of despair about everything that happens to you, because it’s basically arbitrary.
But now it seems like what we get in order to humanize the opposing side are stories about how, despite the presence of a few bad apples or whatever, the innocent folk living under the enemy regime are pitiable and oppressed, so they need to be saved by destroying their government or whatever. It’s very imperialistic. I’m sure this sort of thing was floating around during the cold war too, but it feels like kind returned as a dominant narrative in stories like this since the 90’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the route Discovery takes to “humanize” its Klingons, they’ll introduce some neutral other Klingon character who realizes it is better for everyone if he aligns with the federation or some nonsense.
The sad thing is DS9 is really a perfect example of how to do this kind of story with a liiiitttle bit of nuance, and it’s unlikely that we will ever see anything like it from trek ever again. Not only are the Klingons never fully “redeemed,” e.g. instead of showing that deep down Klingons are just like us, and we should be best friends forever, they are allowed to still seem really alien and different and independent of the federation, yet at the same time they’ve been able to reach a sort of comfortable balance of power that prevents any major conflict, even though the potential for it is always still there. It’s a really rare vision of a world or galaxy or whatever in which it is possible for there to be more than one massive, powerful state, and yet still have peace.
But also with the Cardassians they revisit the same idea except their expansionist ambitions are kind of compromised by the dominion and it’s all very complicated. And also DS9 is willing to not make the Federation look 100% heroic all the time, with the Maquis and all that. But the best thing that DS9 contributes to this is including a very Le Carre-esque espionage story with Garak, but the twist is that even though he recognizes that the Federation is no different from Cardassia wrt espionage, no one he’s in contact with in the Federation seems to realize this–there’s no character to stand in for federation espionage that is humanized in the same way Garak is, but there are lots of characters who are still able to recognize that what he does or did is no different from what people within the Federation must have done or still actively be doing. It’s kind of brilliant.
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man not getting an entire series of michelle yeoh as captain is a huge ripoff
Okay to fanfic for just a bit, assuming they want to keep pretending this is the main timeline:
We saw on Enterprise the Klingons going from their TMP->TNG->ETC look (their “true” appearance) to their TOS look by being infected by Khan’s augment virus and taking on more human features as a result.
So maybe the Klingons at large, so disgusted by the new humany-variety did some kind of gene modification or self alteration to be protect themselves from the virus and/or even become even less human, becoming the new wacky monster boys we see now who rule the empire
And maybe if this show is, as it seems to be, about the creation of The Neutral Zone, then maybe Kang, Kodos, Kor and the other orangeface boys are forming some kind of underground rebellion to take back the empire and they have to team up with the feds to do so
anyway this would all be way easier and not require any extra nonsense if they just said this is the JJ verse or a third thing
i’m not really bothered by hologram screens or things looking too high tech or whatever but these wild looking klingons ten years before kirk is my personal nitpick limit
maybe it’s just riker pitching everyone his new idea for a holodeck season
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here’s my idea for star trek as horror and the whole Klingon thing: what the hell does history even mean when you can touch and taste any revisionist idea of galactic history you want?
This is 100% true and I’m pretty sure she is just too expensive for the show.
This is precisely why this is a project you Must Do
It is your destiny, Topher.