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

That one was excellent. I cannot believe how seamlessly Reno fits into engineering. Everything is immediately better.

Loved the TOS-ey ancient space orb, loved Saru getting max screen time, loved the sass all up and down engineering. Please let this be a sign of things to come.

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Holy shit the Major Tom brain-drilling

So dang good

“Hey Kiddo”

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I loved that.

this stuff’s been in the back of my mind since the ship got damp on that first black alert, i’m so into it

i’m so psyched to see what stilly becomes

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When you mention the viewscreen stuff, are you talking about how we can never parse anything that’s going on through that window?

no although that is bananas

i mean the little tiny subplot of how pike likes viewscreens over holograms and now it turns out the holograms are messing with the ship function

just the silly little stuff they are trying to do to slowly morph this high tech shit into 1960s era futurism

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omg i’m also so excited to see what Saru’s like from here on. weird he said he’s never felt like this before when like, he totally did on that one moon right?

Christopher Pike, more like Bill Adama.

was thinking

a.) the phrase Earth-English implies a lot
b.) kind of weird i guess that there is spoken Vulcan on Enterprise, TOS, The Movies, but not yet on this pretentious ass show with a character raised on Vulcan

Oh my god I had the same thought. The notes in this episode about how Earth works are… different than I imagined.

So American English became the standard language for all of Earth after World War III? Is that the official language of the Federation even now?

There was a comment made by Michael or Saru right then where they said that all the bridge crew spoke English, but beyond the bridge, other sections might not. So it’s not a requirement of the academy that you learn English then?

That latter case actually fits into what I imagined, which was that with the invention of the Universal Translator, nobody needed a “standard language” and everyone spoke whatever. The bridge crew, I imagined, all spoke different languages. Picard might only speak French, Worf always spoke Klingon, etc. Saru’s grumbling about how nobody took other languages would fit into that.

Then I imagined all the times the ship’s gone completely dead across all the Trek shows, where the translator couldn’t be present or working, so, I guess everyone is required to know English. Also, in the Enterprise era, they didn’t have that thing working yet, so they must’ve still just all been speaking English.

Yeah it’s weird.

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Yeah on Enterprise they are literally building the UT as part of the plot and explicitly say out loud that they are speaking English.

Also we see how much colonization of the frontier there is even in the TOS era. Even on Enterprise, space truckers are way ahead of Starfleet flying around. Maybe English has developed differently on different planets. Like you have to specify “Earth-English”

Trek is always kinda generally linguistically restrained for something centuries in the future (i mean it’s better this way just as a storytelling device) except weird things have fallen out of fashion like Kirk not understanding how to use “dumbass” or Geordi not getting “take a leak”. Of course the Discovery crew is the TV-MA Shitfuck crew in a post Abrams world where they all listen to 20th century rap and pop music so they are slangier.

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Starting to catch up

Short Treks and the first episode of a new season seem to validate my criticisms of the first season by changing tack to a more star-trekky optimistic tone.

They have so far kept what work about STD (capable actors, mainly) but have finally added in a sense of humour and a tone of ethical curiosity that was wholly absent from the first season’s militarist/fascist “Warhammer 40k in Star Trek clothing” leanings.

They also… turned on the lights so I can see anything on my shitty TV.

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this particular STD is a fungus

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god these dorks sure know how to run their mouths philosophizing when the clock is running hahaha

i’m glad they at least tried to semi-correct last season’s stupidest death. i mean i guess i thought it would happen eventually. again the fact that they didin’t kiss after he got out and everything about their relationship still, like season one, seems restrained compared to what they would do with a straight couple

section 31 is still the worst and now we gotta have ash moping around the joint. god i wish ash and georgiou and the klingons all fell into the trash
so wait, the woman pike brought aboard is security for discovery? did they have an actual security officer after tyler? i forget. it’s wild to constantly have no idea the composition of what would be “main” crew on other shows. kinda funny she’s the only one on the ship wearing a skirt but i guess since the enterprise does it?

having the 7 dragonballs or whatever possibly be related to time travel…on this show…and it has something to do with spock…uh…man. i really wonder what kind of nonsense they’re gonna pull

this season feels like a lot of cleaning up the mess of the first one i suppose

Actually enjoyed the mycelial network stuff for a while, particularly when Disco half-jumped and Tilly and Mei boarded the ship in the Upside Down. The look of the hull being eaten away as they walked down hallways was great. As usual, the visuals in this show are spectacular.

The Section 31 stuff is so fantastically unnecessary I’m kind of stunned this is still happening. Just absolutely shoehorned in for zero reason or at to zero dramatic effect. They want us to love that hologram ship and that new bridge set so, so much, and they won’t let us free until we do. I do not care what Georgiou wants or is trying to do. I have as little interest as Michael does in experiencing any interaction with Tyler or Georgiou, now that both characters’ story arcs are fully resolved. Are they really going to just not give them any dramatic motivation at all from here on out?

The retcon about Culber was, ugh, but it was such a dumb decision to kill him in the first place that I’m fine with them undoing it. Just sucks we have to waste a cool concept doing it.

I dunno. I think the trip into the spore universe is overall cool enough to redeem a lot, you just wish that had been the sole focus if they really can’t make this Spock story or Section 31 story work.

Couple of things:

  • Tractor beam effect was cool. I like the idea of little pods that stick to the hull, that are them grabbed by this energy rope.

  • The explanation for how Culber is alive was theeeeeeeee wildest bullshit I’ve seen Trek try to technobabble past us in ages. His “energy” coursed through Stamets and into the mycelial network at the moment of his death. Like, just, consciousness is a an energy?? That you can shoot through dimensions?? And not neurons firing and chemicals flowing and brain matter??

  • Nice scene with Stamet’s talking Culber out from behind the cabinet. Makes me look forward to some more upbeat character dynamics in the future.

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there was that one TNG episode where Picard like teleported his “pattern” into some gas cloud

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Uh this ep was a little too “zootopia” in it’s weird biological predator and prey essentialism for me. Don’t know what I was expecting but the reflexive animal instinct stuff is…a eugenics war. This show has a habit of bringing the weird corny fantasy race stuff that is a low hum throughout Trek to the forefront (Remember Michael categorizing all the mirror universe freedom fighters out loud by their racial traits lol).

I liked the look of the Ba’ul for how distinct it is from the usual Trek species. The devil may care attitude towards upending an entire species culture “barely” works when Star Trek is in a more anthologized format without continuity but something like Discovery that is heavily serialized it sure seemed like a wild thing to do real quick and jet off into space.

Kinda wonder how much The Sphere is gonna be used as a convenient little codex for whatever the problem of the week is gonna be.

I can’t believe the angel is literally an evangelion angel

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I won’t get to watch this episode till tomorrow, but I think season 2 really misbalances plot emphasis. Like the standalone stuff in the episode with the humans too far from home and the episode with the giant sentient rock/fire thing–these all were background noise to whatever the season is trying to build toward. So I’m not surprised to hear that this episode feels rushed over.

Thinking about how all the stuff in Star Trek that is dumb on the surface like black/white white/black dudes or those aliens on enterprise who were fighting the religious war over how many days the universe was created in

like it’s corny but it’s also much truer and sharper than all this weird x-men stuff about trying to treat having deadly superpowers the same as everything else

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I don’t think I ever noticed how bad of an actor Shazad Latif was until this episode.

Also I had a visceral wash of terror as Michael mouthed the words “time traveler,” flashing back to multiple rimshot clown parade time travel arcs across Enterprise and Voyager.

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