Love how Star Trek’s digging up old Babylon 5 hooks for their Enigmatic Spacesuited Time Traveler bit. Only B5 had the decency to slowly build it up over 3 seasons.
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I really hope this is them lampshading and getting away from species-as-culture, like kelpians can be anything post-evolution. I’m gonna be real bummed out if we get Bad Saru because his genetic predator memories blah blah blah.
This is the most irritating sci-fi “thing” and I would really like to just once engage with some content that didn’t indulge in it
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listen to No Rangers Allowed
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aw no what
whenever i think of this i always misremember the title as
‘only rangers left alive’
maybe… spin-off series?
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Trying to… trying to process some of the things that happened in this latest one with Saru. I know I’ve been a little too critical of this show and I’ll definitely dial it back, I just wanna like
So Disco is trying to find information on the red angel, so they warp over to Saru’s planet. Their first act is to beam over the one person on their ship that would for sure cause a diplomatic nightmare, since Saru was plucked from his planet in defiance of the rules the Federation has laid out with the Ba’ul. They beam down directly in front of a Ba’ul camera that Saru evidently didn’t tell them about until now. The Ba’ul are now plainly aware that Saru is here, and we also have to assume the Ba’ul are recording every word Saru and Michael are saying as they are in proximity of that camera.
Saru then meets his sister, tells her everything she knows is a lie, then the Ba’ul arrive to stop him. Saru and Michael beam out, leaving Saru’s sister and the rest of the village to get culled (her greatest fear). The Ba’ul send six massive ships to demand the return of the kelpian they now know is on Discovery. Discovery now has no choice but to get into a shootout with the Ba’ul, one which they will probably lose, which is like… even if they win, that would start a war between Earth and a powerful alien race, which is exactly what they’re supposed to be avoiding out here.
Saru turns himself in, at which point Disco goes through the Sphere’s 3000 year-old logs and finds crucial information they didn’t know they had about Saru’s planet. Saru, now imprisoned and facing certain death, also somehow comes to this conclusion independently, with none of the information we just saw on Disco. Saru and his sister almost die, but are saved by Saru evidently manifesting the strength necessary to break fucking tritanium with his bare hands.
Disco then makes the insane decision to trigger the vahar’ai in every kelpian across the planet, an extremely painful and debilitating process that takes like 10 minutes (Hopefully nobody was in the water during all that) and ultimately gives rise to a race of super-powered, super-strong, aggressive super-predators that evidently eat the Ba’ul. The Ba’ul, seeing the exact thing they had feared for generations unfolding, panic and attempt to commit genocide by triggering all nodes in all villages (nodes that Saru and Discovery both knew about, and knew could destroy a village). Disco is helpless to stop this, and have in essence destroyed the Kelpian race in a single hour.
Then the red angel appears and stops the weapons from firing, saving the Kelpians. With the Ba’ul having clearly just tried to commit genocide, and the kelpians now evolved into their predator form and told their relatives all died by Ba’ul hands for nothing, there is no way in hell they are not going to take revenge on the Ba’ul. Discovery flies off, their work done.
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where’s jett reno why isn’t jett reno in every episode why would u make a character as good as jett reno and then not have her constantly be on screen
i really actually thought they were proving me wrong for a second and staying around for the fallout of the kelpians but no they were just doing angel stuff and they just also opened up a huge time shockwave 2 inches away from all that and then jetted so uh…
so wait spock and pike already did the whole talos iv adventure from the pilot/the menagerie a couple years ago (this also reminds me of how pointless having number one show up was)
are they gonna get more specific about general order 7 from TOS and why starfleet has THE DEATH PENALTY for going there?
is this eventually gonna involve post hideous beep wheelchair/revived body pike from the future
i can only guess from that one short trek that all these time shenanigans will eventually have the ship stranded for a thousand years or whatever?
they really did like 17 trek science metaphors in a row. almost made me miss voyager’s technobabble
this section 31 dude being responsible for Burnham’s parents death is The Worst. i can accept “the universe is about 15 people” style plots but this is like a step too far and i still hate everything to do with section 31
the only good prequel thing in this one was that it actually did feel like it enriched sarek and amanda’s other interactions for me
such a weird show
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All I have are notes for this one because I kept thinking that the shuttle getting out of the rift was going to be a B Plot and the REAL plot was going to start aaaaany time now.
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My brain did not record a thing in the first five minutes of this.
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The shot of how elevators work inside the structure of a Trek ship was cool.
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Based on the time octopus I feel like we might’ve hit the episode where might’ve started to run out of budget?
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I love how they started a fucking time tsunami directly in orbit of Saru’s homeworld.
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Here’s how a scene with Georgiou went:
Georgiou: “I’m impressed you found Spock before we did it and used your OWN mother to do it! I would have enjoyed manipulating MINE like that! If she lived a little longer.”
Michael: “Did you kill her?”
Georgiou: “It’s a blur!”
~END SCENE~
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Am I wrong to feel absolutely certain that the Section 31 stories are never, ever going to be relevant to the main plot here? I feel like they’re going to triple-cross each other up and down, probably have a shootout in the ship, and nobody on Disco is ever going to have noticed.
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Loved that one.
Feel like the writing and the direction was way better, somehow. Even got some good Tyler scenes.
Hope we get more Michael and Pike like this.
Also: I like how the stakes with the red angel are revealed to be, of course, the destruction of all sentient life in the universe.
neat that the cage footage was original original series and not the 2009 remaster which kinda took over as the default version
wondering if michael dying was the original timeline we’ve seen in other trek shows? i guess we’re back to the predestination paradox issue.
THE FATE OF ALL SENTIENT LIFE IN THE GALAXY is corny but I’ll accept it given what they’ve built up please don’t let it be the borg jesus christ,
wait if the probe went to the 28th century and the time travelling suliban from enterprise get their orders from the 28th century then that would actually be hilarious. also seems like the 29th century timecops from voyager should pop up anyway it will be none of these somehow
vina was fine and again this little bit makes “The Menagerie” a litttle bit richer
“say goodbye spock” was a little too cute and not as good as the time data did it
the hugh stuff is incredibly sad but it works for me. on any other star trek, even the ones with serialization i think his trauma would have been one extra episode at most but the fact that they’re really digging in is actually kind of interesting (not that after voq/tyler i really trust them but this is the fourth set of showrunners so maybe…)
The “Control” AI is apparently something canonized from the Trek novels will be intresting to see what it’s deal is and how it relates to Airiam and the conflict with the red angel. (and I suppose what it will mean for the s31 spinoff)
all of the costume and hair and sounds from the 1960s are so much more aesthetically pleasing than the out of control spiral zooms and lens flares and whatnot. from a cinemataography standpoint this show is maybe wilder than the abrams movies?
I’ve been noticing the lens flares a lot more these past three episodes and they’re so fucking stupid it distracts the shit out of me.
I stopped, rewound, and watched where the flare appeared the last few times it happened, and there’s no window or light or anything from which the flare could come from, it just appears, randomly. There was one in the middle of the cafe with no open windows in view.
also interesting they are making Illusion Pike from the end of The Cage definitely canon since they sort of retconned it and used that footage for Real Pike in The Menagerie
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really don’t know how i feel about that one. feels like i’ll have a better grasp on it in the fullness of the season. if this hologram bullshit is the corny reason they find to use only viewscreens for security then that’s a little…much. airiam seriously suddenly getting character development like a guy in a war movie going…“this is my family back home”. like it was semi effective but just shows how weak this show is when it comes to the basics of making a ship feel like a home for these people. based on airiam’s last words, i guess like i thought michael was maybe never supposed to have existed and the red angel changed the timeline for her? still don’t know if i buy this phase of spock’s development being mega angry and shitty with one person all the time. like spock definitely has always had different emotional relationships with people but the idea that feeling stuff is just a fun thing to explore? i mean it makes sense to the degree that she’s the reason he went full vulcan but i don’t know how useful it is. i guess after season 1 you have to be grateful that two characters on the same side have a dynamic with any kind of character conflict at all. the whole concept of CONTROL is very TOS.
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Really enjoyed this one for the first half. I like how they’ve slowed down the pacing and are having more character-to-character discussions. I thought there was some good Pike and Spock as well. Felt right.
Cornwell, while I love her actor, had her character kinda fucked up last season when she was directly responsible for hiring the genocidal Terran empress to the clandestine black ops unit with no oversight. Then later, trying to destroy the entire Klingon homeworld. Hard to just forget all that now, but, again, I want to like her, so I’m doing my best not to overthink it. I like her banter with Pike.
This Spock/Michael stuff is theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee worst. Holy god do I not want to watch another tedious argument between these two.
Once the chess board scene happened and they arrived at Section 31 HQ, this became pure Disco shlock. I love how like… in Discovery, they come up with a very quick, very flimsy first draft of a plan in warp on the way to their objective, they arrive, the plan immediately fails, and they start flying around getting hit with mines aimlessly trying to frantically solve the problem in the middle of a battlefield. Like they have to turn off their shields to avoid attracting the mines, but then buzzsaws come out and they have to turn them back on and just fly randomly hoping something will change and they won’t die.
Nhan actually got some air time finally, after having just hovered in the background of a few occasional scenes all season. I’m all for inter-species diversity but you gotta question the decision to have your chief of security be of a race that has a gigantic lever on both sides of their face that, once pulled, instantly defeats her. Just… her first actual battle as chief of security, and she gets handily taken out before the fight even begins.
I did appreciate how Michael had to use the classic Kirk “slap em in the ears with both hands” maneuver to break free of Airiam’s death choke near the end. I guess TOS always made a big deal about their fight scenes so it’s probably good to have them here.
Anyways, I actually enjoyed the Airiam backstory from the start, it just sucks that the only reason for it was to try to get an emotional beat out of her death at the end. I like the idea that she had some kind of accident and is literally majority machine, with a human brain under.
i guess i’m grateful that they went in so hard at airiam’s funeral because i did want to know more about her but this was still like the least earned emotion they’ve ever had and for this show, that’s saying something. the spock and burnham talk and culber and the admiral’s talk were actually solidly done. despite the plots leading up to them, they actually felt like characters really processing things. the word “time crystal” continues to be a little too doctor who-ish but i guess they were already established to be a thing last season in the time loop episode so it’s only like 70% wild. the concept of burnhams parents feels very much like whenever they decide to make peter parker’s parents into super spies. just feels kind of tacked on and very chosen one/harry potter kind of thing. i mean to be fair siskos mom being a secret magic alien that secretly drove the plot of the show the whole time turned out okay so there’s precedent. man after michelle yeoh, sonja sohn would be one of the people i would be the most excited to see on a star trek show (i mean maybe not this show). anyway her acting style is actually unbelievably perfect casting for burnham’s mom. it was driving me crazy the whole episode that if they thought it was really burnham in the suit then wouldn’t a future burnham already know everything they were going to do in advance? that’s just bad planning, people. sonequa martin green very much fits into the william shatner and avery brooks school of acting the very most and it is wildly entertaining seeing what wild elastic faces she makes as she’s put through the ringer in every conceivable way.
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The fact that everyone can just walk into any room on the ship at any time is utterly wild to me. This one starts with Tilly just bursting into the single most secretive, important meeting on the ship to everyone’s unanimous shock. It was the captain, Section 31, Michael and Spock all talking about the unfathomably-classified super DUPER illegal time traveling federation mech suit and WHAM Tilly’s there.
Last episode, Admiral Cornwell was in the middle of interrogating possible murderer Spock in a high-sensitivity lie detector machine when Michael JUST WALKS IN AND ARGUES WITH THE ADMIRAL
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[picard voice] humans have evolved beyond the need for locks
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wow the new person who replaced airiam is the actress who played airiam last season hahaha
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There were so many rapid-fire shockers in this last ep and every single one of them failed to register even a slightest blip on the ol’ emotiometer:
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It is revealed in a single line that MICHAEL IS THE RED ANGEL AND WILL TIME TRAVEL IN THE PRESUMABLY NEAR FUTURE.
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Stamets fully ends his multi-year relationship with Culber.
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Tyler and Michael make out, getting back together after being in conflict the entire season.
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Michael’s parents were secret agents working for Section 31 her entire life, successfully developing STABLE TIME TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY, the most powerful weapon ever created, in the span of a few years during the Klingon war.
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The head of Section 31 is directly responsible for Michael’s parents’ deaths.
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The Klingons - a cannibalistic warrior race that suicide-bombs their ships and scorns intellectuals as weaklings - evidently have the scientific infrastructure to successfully run a time travel weapons program.