Star Trek Thread: Nemesis 2: Nemeses, etc. (Part 1)

Input Cinephile Shodown
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Everybody’s gotta do the Alien riff at least once I guess

So like in the last ep Georgiou had a Chateau Picard bottle of wine sitting around which okay that’s cute but today these tribbles just…there for no reason chriping during dramatic scenes what a weird idea. are they supposed to be like a villain petting his cat? Is captain bio-creep dissecting them or something in his deadly bone lab lol

The “my eyes literally need dark dramatic lighting” is hilarious

And uncomfortable overtones with his weird fake southern accent basically telling a Black woman “I own you” just bad optics to me (also slightly sus is killing the chinese captain then having the white guy say my family used to make fortune cookies but maybe i’m stretching lol)

So this Impossible Space Mushroom Speed is I think more advanced tech than they had on Voyager if I’m understanding it right which they really are just doing whatever they want huh

I do actually really like the engineering consoles which despite having minority report holo screens use big ass chunky colorful 1960s buttons and switches which were nice to see for a second

Man they tried to be cute with the “ward” stuff for a minute but nah now they really directly fanfic inserting her up in Spock’s life (looks like Mia Kirshner will be playing Amanda Grayson in flashbacks later on even [making the weird Star Trek/24 crossover cast slightly larger])

And kind of similar to what I said the last episode but Enterprise really set the bar so unbelievably low for this but the Discovery crew having discernible personalities that inform the plot even if they are like the most worn out archetypes is a welcome thing

I wonder which person in the writer’s room thought Black Alert sounded extra badass

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sleazy i’m not ashamed to admit i had that same thought, re: fortune cookie

at least they stopped going overboard on the dutch angles and Abraham’s lens flare.

what were the places that she spore-warped (spwarpwd?) to? i figured they had some good refs in there

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The longer Voyager went on, the more apparent it became that you were going to need to embrace the shlock to get any entertainment out each episode’s new and exotic clownshow. I started to love the lengths the showrunners would go to in order to infuriate Tuvok with the mere existence of Neelix. At a certain point, Neelix and Tuvok’s entire cosmic purpose was to function as a wacky straight-man-annoying-gremlin comedy duo for any given episode’s C plot. It started becoming amazingly funny to me how funny the showrunners thought this bit was - Tuvok was endlessly hounded by this horrible demonic goblin man that tested every fiber of his control on a daily basis. I pray that one day GeneralGrin will start up a Voyager Recut project because every one of their later scene is some Garfield Minus Garfield comedy gold waiting to happen.

That brings me to an ep I caught last night, “Prophecy.” I somehow got pulled into the Trek wiki after looking up hot factoids about the new klingon redesign, and saw that there was an episode of Voyager where they encountered a TOS-era klingon bird of prey, and queued it up to watch while I worked. It was apparently like the fourth-to-last episode they ever did.

Turns out the ship only survives up until the first commercial break, but by then the crew of 200 klingons has managed to get themselves beamed on board Voyager for survival. The crew must now accommodate a sea of space bikers while the command staff sort out how to get them to a new planet. Neelix immediately gives up his quarters to house a klingon family, and moves directly into Tuvok’s quarters, telling him that he’s either going to allow Neelix to bunk with him, or he’s going to to have to kick out a klingon family from Neelix’s quarters. Tuvok, backed into an impossible nightmare situation, sighs and allows it.

Later, in Neelix’s bar, Kim gets himself in the sights of a horned up klingon woman who is like twice his height, and she picks him for a mate. Harry desperately tries to find a way out of being fucked mercilessly by a space biker, and runs into Neelix in the hall. Neelix then emmasculates him in the hall by screaming at him about Harry not meeting his nutritional requirements, asserting dominance in front of the klingon woman and taking her favor.

We’re then treated to the scene below (which cuts off a bit early), where Neelix has fucked a klingon space biker six ways to Sunday, absolutely defiling everything in Tuvok’s quarters. There’s a scene right after this where Tuvok walks in to his quarters and just surveys the utter decimation of what once was his singular safe place from Neelix’s twisted wrath.

I laughed so fucking hard at the lengths this episode went to get Neelix into the position where he could reduce Tuvok’s quarters to a mass of shredded bedsheets, broken ornaments and talaxian nutt. Tuvok has absolutely no choice now but to cover everything in gasoline, light it all on fire and vent it into space.

Boy howdy.

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This is a pretty good encapsulation of the absolute worst star trek plot, where legitimately interesting sci fi premises are shredded to pieces in the service of horrible sitcom bullshit and melodrama

E.g. Voyager in its entirety

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Voyager set off as this Brady Bunch Odd Couple blended crew thing but that kind of fell away in the first couple episodes, and that tension got redirected from Tuvok and Chakotay to Tuvok and Neelix pretty quickly.

Really, the true conflict was between Mulgrew and Ryan I hear.

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Voyager mostly sucks unless the Doctor is on screen.

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My guess is that the magic quantum spores are going to prove dangerous/unreliable and research on them will be verboten by the end of the series.

Also lol at physics=biology

Also also maybe the tribble wasn’t a throwaway reference and it/they will be weaponized by Lorca and used against the Klingons?

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Liked this one a lot. The black-site-as-a-ship idea is cool, Saru is wonderful, I liked Tilly, the work scenes and discussion of the blending of physics and biology were interesting, and I like the idea that the federation ideals are being stretched to breaking point to win the war. It’s DS9 territory, naturally, but having this be early in the federation seems like it makes it more believable that everyone hasn’t fully committed to the ideas yet. I fully expect some twist near the end of the show saying that the blue spores are a sentient being they’re killing every time they superwarp, meaning they’ll have to scrap the tech if they want to keep the federation’s soul.

Cronenberg scene felt pretty out-of-place, but part of me likes that they don’t shy away from how volatile and dangerous this rush for technology is going to be. Chase sequence was shaky and annoying. Alice in Wonderland stuff was really embarrassing.

Visual effects are unbelievably good. Hit me this episode when the shuttle was pulling into the docking bay to land. It was just a simple little scene that looked absolutely amazing in a really not-showoff-ey way.

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Kind of cool to think that if the federation was truly going to build a warship, they’d build the biggest science vessel they could manage. Hundreds of people working on 30 separate science projects at a time, with military pressure to produce on a schedule.

Already the Discovery’s greatest weapon is a particular tech they figured out with the spores.

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Watching the Orville is painful because

a) why didn’t CBS just make a new Trek that looks and feels like this

b) if they excise the bickering exes subplot and turn down the pop culture references I’ll keep watching it

Discovery is worse than ST09 as measured in Trek vibe units.

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On the other hand, if this is going to be a McFarlane joint, I’m looking forward to the musical episode based on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Edit: OK, episode 3 was blisteringly stupid, never mind.

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I’m real real worried that nu trek is going to normalize section 31 as the ‘good guys doing ‘what needs to be done’’

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I find the way the series is setting up a b-plot to literally just be Klingon game of thrones kind of hilarious, TBH.

The ‘ones who warp away from omelas’ mushroom torture drive thing might be an interesting moral dilemma for the crew to rise above…but I fear it’s just going to end up another grimdark flourish on the series instead of a classic Trek style moral dilemma. I wasn’t expecting them to add ANY complexity to the space monster though, so they could still surprise me.

They really need to hammer out the main character’s personality though. She’s almost as all over the place as Janeway.

I like angry mycologists guy though. Easily my favorote part of show.

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the holo-mirror was cute

i guess the impossibly unique and wild way the magic mushroom drive works explains why it’s not replicated or seen later on

the entire crazy hippie idea of it and the delivery of it with the wacky fast and the furious spinning rims except the entire ship is so stupid i actually like it

so many moments in this episode were just total turn offs

killing off the security officer so soon, the klingons having eaten georgiou, saying that fucking elon musk is a generationally important genius yuck, yuck, yuck.

the decision to bury the klingons under prosthetics and vocal processing and make them speak real klingonese and be important enough to be the b-plot of every episode was a mistake

so the loser klingon gonna go see the klingon version of the sisterhood of karn from doctor who i guess?

okay also kol being from the house of kor when original flavor kor shows up in ten years looking like the wonderful goofy beardy orangeman he is? what is the deal with these klingons tho for real.

also who got the telescope and didn’t salvage/destroy the ship/get the dilithium i dunno man

again they get the rhythm of trek is so right (okay minus the klingon scenes) but this thing is all over the place. like we’ve seen multiple season long war arcs in trek but this show is something else

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Agreed with all the criticisms and yet I was feeling this episode more than the others probably because Michael’s personally did a complete 180 and now she’s doing the whole Star Trek curiosity about the universe thing instead of whatever the first 3 episodes were (maladjusted and extremely prejudiced warmonger potential admiral material)

Also we finally got to see sick bay and the doctor character and how did it take so long to get to this point. It’s probably the most obvious tip off that it we’re not in a normal star trek series. If I hated myself, I would churn out a thinkpiece about how going all the way back to TOS, and in most subsequent series, medical officers and medical science were hugely privileged above “soldier” type characters in the show’s presentation. Kirk doesn’t go to a redshirt for advice, he goes to the ship’s doctor. This is in keeping with the general pacifist attitudes the shows have continued to express over the decades. Now, in discovery, everyone self describes as a soldier and it’s kind of maddening for how anti-Trek that attitude is.

klingons as a species that eats other sentient species is grotesque. They’re trying way too hard to make the klingons into monsters which makes the excessive focus on space orc politics completely incomprehensible.
Killing off the security officer so early in the show felt very… Tasha Yar. I wonder if they were making a reference to that.

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Man, Michael being an empathetic, caring soul who understands animals is so completely out of left field it’s amazing. I love the fact that she uses Saru as a tool to gauge whether or not her captive murderbeast is intentionally threatening, just to prove to everyone that she’s more empathetic than they are, and that they’re all being callous idiots. Ugh.

One scene dovetailed into pure shlock: Landry takes out a knife and a gun, doesn’t explain what she’s doing until she opens up Ripper’s pen, ineffectively shoots it with “one of the most dangerous weapons in the universe” inside the science bay packed with bones and artifacts and super dangerous weaponry, chases it up the wall, then is instantly killed when it falls on her and eats her face. Boy howdy.

Klingon stuff was weird. It’s really starting to grate on me how labored their speech is through the makeup. Can’t believe we have to sit through entire scenes of this.

One thing I absolutely loved: Every time Discovery uses the spore drive. The visuals of the ship folding in on itself with space itself was fucking awesome. It’s an absolute treat to see this drive being used.

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I actually want to thank ppl itt for posting these spoilers because it has confirmed that this is absolutely not a show that I want to watch. It makes me sad that post-GoT it seems like every ‘prestige’ sci fi or fantasy show has to try to be as grotesque and disturbingly violent as possible. Whatever happened to escapism…

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I disagree with this but basically because we’ve known her for less than four hours of screentime

But the fact that the mutiny and her action hero skills are “what we know” about her is part of the problem.

The decision for Michael to go mutineer and try to attack the Klingon ship is such a goofy thing to hang the entire premise of Discovery on. It feels like the show was trying to make some “In The Pale Moonlight” style tough decision but for a character we’d known for 30 minutes with almost no other context. Everyone who knows Michael seems to feel like this was wildly out of character for her and it hangs over everything else.

I honesty feel like the idea of her killing instead of capturing T’Kuvma out of anger because her emotions got out of control and his martyrdom starting the war, like that honestly would have been interesting enough on it’s own and relatable as a character beat.

The mutiny thing feels like a lot of what we’ve seen on Discovery, like the plot gears are turning just for the sake of them turning to the detriment of anything that gets in their way

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Cutting out the mutiny would’ve at least solved a lot of the narrative acrobatics it’s taken to get Michael onto the Discovery and back to work as the captain’s confidant.

Like, her shooting T’Kuvma would’ve maybe been court martial-worthy, but you could easily justify her being released from prison early as the war heated up, since they needed good soldiers. With the mutiny having happened, though, it doesn’t make sense that they’d keep this unstable x factor on board their ultra-important secret weapon.

In this episode she stole an entire cylinder of spores to feed to Ripper. Those spores are like the single most valuable commodity in the Federation. That would be an absolutely outrageous thing for a crewmember to do without permission.

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I was wondering why “Choose Your Pain” felt a lot snappier when I realized we didn’t see VoQ’s boring ass lol. Generally speaking though, I think Discovery, even with the Klingon scenes, is better than many streaming serialized shows at understanding the virtue of making “an episode” an individual unit of entertainment instead of a vague, blurry part of a 13 hour movie

Saru has really had good follow through on his character arc in a very short amount of time that is basically unseen in trek outside of late DS9? Also seeing the goofy “most decorated captains” list activated every possible emotional reaction in me simultaneously

Lorca’s tragic backstory about being X-treme Hard Choices Edgelord by murdering his own crew and keeping his eyes broken out of guilt like…what? I’m confused if this is “secret” info…are Ash/Mudd the only two who know about that? Lorca really feels like he just snuck over from the Battlestar Galactica cutting room floor or something. Dude is definitely the captain most on track to be an evil admiral since Janeway. Also with Ash I couldn’t help but think of Clem Fandango since I just watched Toast of London.

I guess Tilly blurting out “Fuck” is just part of her vague…non neurotypical-ness? Like I wish they would just directly say she has autism or OCD or something specific because I feel like they are just gesturing in the vague direction of tourette’s or “the spectrum” or something and it’s…weird.

This whole “we can curse now we’re big boys” silliness in general feels counter to Kirk seeing profanity as so alien in the 1980s but this show never cares much about…anyway

Rainn Wilson was actually perfect to me as Mudd in this context. (he even did look more like the original than I thought) I feel like maybe Quark from DS9 was partially based on Mudd so retroactively imbuing Mudd with some Quarkness is a smart idea. Having a little counterpoint the Feds is always good and the idea that he could be recurring is already more narratively interesting to me than any showdown with VoQ or whatever

Anyone else feel like Detmer is getting shortchanged? I feel like for someone who survived the Shenzhou (and was physically damaged by it?) and now has to see Burnham all the time she is kind of a non-entity? I mean it’s interesting that this is a trek show actually focused more specifically on Science Ops instead of the bridge crew but still

Having Stamets be dating/married to the doctor is a choice I’m glad about. There’s always the problem, especially in genre fiction, that when one character is the ____ character, they have to both carry the load as a token and risk all of their plots being read as “why is this happening to this specific kind of marginalized person” so this is good. Also Trek had a lot to make up for after never years of non-existent or peripheral at best queer relationships so having two of the crew be gay is a smart move. Now just don’t tragically kill them that would be nice

I really could’ve sworn Burnham was gonna be in the cage when they leapt out of Klingon space. Wonder if Stamets will face any real punishment for…uh illegally genetically engineering himself

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