Star Trek - Discovery - 2.14: Such Sweet Sorrow, part 2

[Anthoney]

Sorry to be a winger (as in a person having a winge) but I though the battle was a bit over long, towards the end I found myself wanting to shout "Get on with it!"

I thought it was a little to Michael Bay.

 

[Dave]

I thought it was a little too Michael Bay.

Nah! Leland would have turned into a truck.

 

[Cathbad]

The candy bar or the galaxy?

You cheap or sumfin??

 

[L.L.Lotte]

I'm serious here:

As much as I love Star Trek, I hope they never start another series. I'm just so tired of the 'fans" hating everything about it.

I think the problem "Trekkies" have with Discovery is it is not like any other Star Trek that came before, but that's what makes it great. Their reaction is "This is not the Star Trek I remember!" which causes an unfair bias.

It's a serialised show, not episodic -- every other Star Trek is episodic. I'm not saying all other Star Treks are bad, nor that they didn't have some good story arcs, but I can't understand how anybody could prefer an episodic story of the week show over a show that has one big long epic story throughout the entire season/series.

A Trekkie friend of mine's favourite episode of the first season is the time loop episode -- which I considered to be the worst episode of the show to date -- and his reasoning behind that was because it felt like a classic trek episode...

Anyway... I was really happy with the second season of Discovery. It surpassed the first season by a considerable amount. Huge improvement -- not that the first season was bad, I just felt the ending of the first season was rushed. They couldn't do the first season's story justice in the limited number of episodes they had, yet for some reason felt the need to wrap up the Klingon war storyline within the first season. It could have easily been 2 seasons in of itself.

At least they corrected that mistake in the second season. It was a great storyline and ended well.

I actually like how they have worked it into canon yet still able to continue the series without ruining said canon. If they hadn't done that, then they would have had to take the same direction as the new movies; made it an alternative setting / parallel world, which would mean they'd be stuck rewriting all of history.

 

[Glaysher]

DS9 was more serial than episodic by the end

 

[ctg]

DS9 was more serial than episodic by the end

Yes and it was it's strength. Not flaw. In a way it was ahead of the other series. Now it has become a norm to be serialised rather than having filler episode filled season with a few connecting pieces in between. But there was awfully a lot fillers in the DS9.

 

[Glaysher]

Yes and it was it's strength. Not flaw.

I don't think I said it was a bad thing. DS9 remains my favourite Trek though I've always been partial to TOS having grown up watching the films.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

Well I just watched it - season two - and was again disappointed, but for entirely new reasons. I was really angry with season one because it basically trashed trek. In season two they attended to these problems. The Klingons have been redesigned so they look more Klingon and less monster of the week, they've got rid of that absolutely appalling spot lighting so that the crew aren't stumbling around in the dark moving from point light to point light, and most important of all, the crew gel. They get on with one another. They believe in the goals and aspirations of the Federation. And they aren't trying to commit genocide! Season two suddenly felt a lot more like Trak, and I applaud them for that.

But then they brought in the logic problems with their plot etc. Time travel is always bad for logic, but season two is a bootstrap paradox from start to end. They started out by chasing these events, which they didn't know what they were but still apparently believed were so much of a threat that the captain of one ship had to take command of another and rush out as if it was an emergency. Why? But then when we find out about the data which the AI (Control) wants so desperately that it's going back through time to get it, it's going back from a time where it had already wiped out all sentient life. It had already won the war. So why go back to change the past and grab the data that it already had?

Then there's Spok - who I liked, but who's mad and yet somehow makes a miraculous recovery for no reason simply because logic has told him he wasn't mad after all. Hmmm.

And last the only way to save the world / universe is to get the data into the future, beyond the point where the AI can get its grubby digital hands on it. Oh crap! Yeah maybe that's a plan if you can't delete the data or destroy it. But lets call it plan B. Plan A involves no final battle at all, No one dying. No trip to the future, death and struggle. You're on a ship with a spore drive that can take you fifty thousand light years away in the blink of an eye. So lets use it. Go somewhere fifty thousand light years away, let the AI spend two hundred odd years trying to reach you to steal the data assuming it knows where you are somehow, and spend a few weeks in the middle of nowhere devising a better plan to get rid of the data. But apparently they forgot they had the spore drive and running through the wormhole to the future was the only solution!

Oh dear!

Yeah season two was definitely better. It hearkens back to what Trek should be and fixes some of the most terrible failings of season one. But how could they make such glaring mistakes in their story line?

Cheers, Greg.