They led into Picard mowing down Borg with a Tommy gun in First Contact, so they’re a-okay with me!
Incidentally, I just watched The Big Hit, which came out in 1998, right around the time that In The Pale Moonlight aired, and it features Avery Brooks chewing scenery as a cartoonishly over-the-top mob boss, so I like to pretend that it’s a holosuite program he ran to loosen up after the events of the episode.
I hated them. I also hated the Chaotica/Captain Proton episodes on Voyager. I’m sure they were fun for the people involved, but I got second hand embarrassment trying to watch them.
I found his raspy, gravely voice unbearable. I can’t stand to hear him sing. I fast forward though it every time.
Ironically, I rather liked his acting and enjoyed his character otherwise— although I think the writers relied a bit too much on his character/the Vegas lounge program schtick, and “Mirror Vic” was an absurdity that should never have existed.
I had a hard time buying Jean-Luc Picard as a hard boiled PI, but I suppose that’s the point of a holodeck program- you get to fantasize about being something you aren’t if you want to.
Picard being a fan of the Dixon Hill novels, on the other hand… that seems out of character.
Eh, I have to admit, I have a hard time buying it, too. This is a guy who reads Shakespeare in his spare time, not trashy, pulp detective novels from the early-mid 20th century. He even thought taking a trip on The Orient Express would be too indulgent. Picard liking Dixon Hill novels makes no sense. Just like off-roading in an ATV.
I know a guy who is a literature snob and is probably the last person I would have expected to really get into Raymond Chandler novels. Anyway, he was raving about those books so I read a few. It turns out that Chandler was a phenomenally weird wordsmith. Inventive, funny, and unexpected. If you're looking at midcentury American writers, Chandler is hugely underrated. Maybe in a few centuries he'll get his due.
Sure, it's detective pulp. But it's detective pulp that's been given a strong hallucinogen and whacked over the head a few times before waking up in the desert.
I liked seeing the actors get to play some different roles and I liked seeing the fantasy life of the characters whenever there was something off the beaten path. It helps round everybody out, in the same way that playing an instrument or having a pet does.
Part of me likes that we’re getting some Breen lore, part of me is worried that spending more time inside Breen culture takes away some of the inscrutability and unpredictability that made them so menacing in DS9, and part of me is a little disappointed they didn’t go with the Typhon Pact “there are actually five different species all pretending to be the same Breen” interpretation, because that always made me giggle. But all of me fukken loves one thing:
Michael’s short little throwaway “wait, you’re Breen?” to L’ak pretty heavily implies that this is the first Breen anyone has seen without an encounter suit in over a thousand years. Way to go, Breen!
part of me is a little disappointed they didn’t go with the Typhon Pact “there are actually five different species all pretending to be the same Breen” interpretation
That would be suspiciously close to what the Xindi were in Enterprise, so I don’t think that would have been a good idea.
I might not like Discovery for the usual parts, but they are doing a lot of stuff really well this season.
Like showing us a helmetless Breen without anyone having any clue. Love the helmet redesign too, I am partial to the old one but it always looked a bit like a duck. All the Breen backstory was quite interesting.
8 companies make almost all of our content. 5 of them make most of it. If Paramount and Sony merge, it will be 4, with 2 out of 8 making the most content.
The report comes as Paramount — owner of Paramount Pictures, CBS, Paramount+ and cable channels like MTV and Comedy Central — has been in exclusive M&A talks with David Ellison’s Skydance Media the past two weeks. Meanwhile, word emerged last week that Sony Pictures Entertainment was mulling a joint bid with private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, which had offered more than $27 billion for the entirety of the media company inclusive of its more than $14 billion in debt.
Skydance? Oh good, let’s flush main timeline Star Trek straight down the toilet and only do Kelvin Trek from now on because pew pew explosions!
Definitely, but I have more hope in Sony not ruining Star Trek than I do in Skydance. Never mind the fact that most of their movies are bigger on special effects than they are on plot, look at what they’ve offered the world in terms of television thus far:
Sony? Who the hell knows. They make good TV and terrible TV. They haven’t done much in terms of sci-fi TV, but they seem to at least be able to make a reasonable TV show that’s not just a small screen version of pew pew explosions.
That said, I think selling Star Trek to Skydance would still be a waste. I would rather see it go to Apple (which has been very good to science fiction from the start) or Universal (because I think they would also take good care of it, and because I love the irony of giving Trek back to NBC).
Apple (which has been very good to science fiction from the start)
I don’t have Apple TV, so I can’t speak for any of their other shows, but I have been told to avoid their Foundation TV show at all costs since I like the novels.
Foundation is really good, IMO. They added new characters to the story and changed some things up, so if you think the books are perfect you might have trouble accepting it. It’s one of the most visually-breathtaking shows ever.
But Apple TV’s crowning achievement is For All Mankind.
The story is Soviet Russia beats America to the moon, therefore the space race never ends and the USSR never falls. But the best description I’ve heard is that it “shows what happens between the moon landing and Star Trek.”
Their other scifi stuff ranges from okay to excellent. THERE’s a lot to choose from now. I just finished Constellation and really enjoyed it.
I just finished Constellation and really enjoyed it.
Just scrolling through some old trek conversations, literally 2 days after finishing constellation and I read this … woot!
Yea, I found myself really enjoying it too. One of those wonderful things where I had no idea what it was going in and finding a sort of lower-hype style sci-fi trying for a real attempt at something a bit more dramatic and even surreal and I was just like “yes!”. It certainly had its flaws IMO, but when it was working it was some of my fav TV in recent times!
spoilerI loved that scene in the “other”/liminal cabin (well all of the cabin stuff was brilliant for me TBH) where the two Alice’s and Jo have united and are just kinda processing their grief together. IMO, what a way to take a basic sci-fi idea, combine it with some surrealism in a fairly grounded mechanic (audio tapes and mirrors!) and make a statement about what tragedy is like.
I’m with you … I think Apple and Star Trek is a perfect fit in the current environment.
Apple don’t want anything to be too political about current affairs (see John Stewart) but clearly like the idea of doing sci-fi and stuff that’s generally idealistic or moralistic. I’d expect them to be pretty respectful of the franchise’s history and core ideals.
Lots of good points have already been made in this thread, I’ll just chime in to say I’ve really enjoyed Discovery. It definitely has its problems, and I’m kinda bipolar when it comes to Burnham, sometimes I love her, sometimes I can’t stand her…she never really learns any lessons. But the show is gorgeous and tried to do something a little different. I respect that.
The action sequences and cinematography are better and more exciting than any other Trek I can think of. That sequence in S05E01 where Burnham is blown out into space, has a suit materialize on her, jetpacks towards Discovery and then transports through the viewscreen directly into her captain’s chair was BAD ASS.
I just wish the show was released in 4K HDR. Seems like a waste of beautiful visuals.
The instances hosting active Star Trek communities didn’t exist during the previous season of Discovery, so Lemmy isn’t a great way to gauge relative interest.
On Reddit, the /r/startrek discussion thread for 4x02 has 1.1k comments and 4x03 has 600 comments while the thread for 5x03 only has about 400 comments. This seems to support your hypothesis.
I gave up on it halfway through season 3. I loved many of the concepts introduced in the show but ultimately found them unable to make up for the show’s style. It was just exhausting to watch, and when I realized it I stopped.
I saw him speak once. The one time I went to an event at the L.A. Science Fantasy Society- let’s just say their clubhouse has an odor that made me not return. It was an honor ceremony for Bjo Trimble (which I found out was pronounced Bee-Jo).
Anyway, he spoke very eloquently about his wife and their time in Star Trek fandom. I’m glad they were both around to keep it alive. RIP.
Edit: Wrote memorial, she was getting an award. She’s still alive.
I am a die hard fan of Discovery and am fiercely defensive of it.
But the first episode of Season 5 was so atrociously awful that it killed all my excitement for the season and I haven’t had the energy or strength to start the next episode, despite the fact 4 episodes are already out.
I go out of my way to defend the show and love it. I mean my account name is taken from one of the characters of the show. All my ship models are from Discovery. My calendar is a Discovery calendar. I have a DSC Starfleet Badge. Like I FUCKING LOVE Discovery but the first episode had some of the worst writing I’ve seen from any Star Trek ever. I can’t think of a single other episode in any of Star Trek that was as idiotic as this one was. The writers had no fucking clue what they were doing and the episode is egregiously bad. Half of the episode involves ‘Rise of Skywalker’ type shenanigans where the characters blindly luck into the next thing or just happen to have the thing they need because the universe is catering to them. Let me demonstrate an example from the first couple of minutes of the episode. This does spoil the first 5 minutes but doesn’t spoil anything plot relevant that wasn’t mentioned in trailers or whatever.
The Discovery is a rapid response vessel that can show up anywhere at a moments notice. This was what it was literally designed for. To be able to appear behind enemy lines as a surprise tactic. Burnham has to go get something from a ship and they know other people are after it. So what do they do? Jump in on top of the ship without readying up or doing fucking anything which means they’re caught with their pants down. They scan the vessel and see two people onboard who then vanish so they spend 3+ minutes getting ready (their suits can literally materialize on them now) and get onboard the other vessel. They know the enemy can vanish from sensors and theorized that they can probably personally cloak. So when they land, one of the away team notes that they were here recently because water vapor is still in the air and they can follow it. So they do. They then proceed to visually clear the ship. They also never mention the water vapor again. So, fucking obviously, they are jumped by someone who is cloaked and shot at from behind.
The whole episode is littered with writing that idiotic. They will give a thing and then not pay it off or they will just use a random thing out of fucking nowhere. Like a character having information that they categorically should not have as previous seasons had made it abundantly clear that the character would not have this information. Yet they do anyway, breaking their own rules of the show. Not to mention that the writing of the episode also undoes 4 seasons worth of character development for multiple characters, sending them back to Season 1 behavior with no explanation, and frames them as genuinely bad people who are putting themselves before the mission. Like
spoilerOne character genuinely threatening their superior officer to let terrorists get away unless they’re given information they have no right or claim to in any manner
In short, it fucking sucks so bad that it sent me into a spiral of depression because if my favorite show starts off their final season this awful how the hell is it going to possibly continue?
I feel you. I wasn’t ever as big a fan as you, but had a depressing moment somewhere in the middle of Picard S2 right after disco s4 (which I didn’t enjoy) where I realised that I just didn’t like new-Trek and had been doing my best to enjoy it as a fan not realising the work I was putting in. It all slipped away and I was just depressed for a bit. It’s the reason I haven’t started disco season 5 (while I was watching the other seasons live).
And what about that part with the warp trail shenanigans? There were 20 different trails, so they don’t know which way they really went? Why not just do 20 jumps and find out? Didn’t they do like 100 in short succession in season 1?
Why not just do 20 jumps and find out? Didn’t they do like 100 in short succession in season 1?
They had trails but not end points. They knew the direction of travel but not where they would stop. With speed variances and cloaking shit that would have been a no go. Book was needed for that end point. A point he should not have known but that’s a completely different complaint.
I saw the second episode which was better. 2 out of 10. This season is testing my fucking patience though and I don’t see Burnham as anything other than a shitty person now. Everything that comes out her mouth annoys me and feels unearned, undeserved, and outright insulting. Like when she starts talking down to someone for behavior she’s guilty of in that same episode I want to just start beating the shit out of Sarek for proving that you cannot raise a human under Vulcan ways and have them end up as anything other than a monumental cunt.
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