Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Sept 7, 2017 7:13:05 GMT -6
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Atoz 77
Vice Admiral
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[ss:Insurrection]
Posts: 4,065
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Post by Atoz 77 on Sept 25, 2017 7:44:36 GMT -6
"The Vulcan Hello", Part 1. In a nutshell: Gosh, that was disappointing, wasn't it?
It opened with some Klingons complaining about some terrible enemy -- Klingons that didn't even look like Klingons so I was inclined to just kind of let it wash past me. Then it switched scene to two women officers marching across a desert somewhere. Their mission apparently is to clandestinely phaser open a dry well so that this alien species, Crepusculans, can survive. But they have to be quick because a storm is blowing in, and if they don't beam out before it hits, they could be trapped on the planet for 79 years or some hogwash like that. But then the captain saves the day by having them walk around in a huge star trek logo figure, and their ship somehow spots that and beams them up. Really? A storm is blowing up so fiercely that apparently communicators can't penetrate, and yet somehow they can see footprints in sand? I just shook my head. Cute solution to the problem, but just a little bit far-fetched.
It went downhill from there. I'm not even going to talk about the plot because the plot is hard enough to follow let alone describe. The ship is called the Shenzhou. The whole set design of the thing -- the ship, the interiors, the stupid-looking uniforms that look like costumes for some cheap 80's sci-fi movie -- all reminded me of the ENT series. But the bridge looked more like the one in the awful J.J. Abrams movie, with glaringly bright light from the stars streaming in like a sunset at the beach. It was like those are just windows in the side of the ship and not viewscreens that can be turned off if they need to. Later on, Klingons attack with a bright light, and the captain complains "where are my filters?" Huh? You're telling me that a science vessel has never had to explore close enough to a star to need some way to deal with bright light? Or that a starship can't operate without viewscreens if it has to?
The stardate was given as 1207.2 and there's an appearance by Sarek, but they also said that nobody had heard from the Klingons for a hundred years. So apparently the time frame is just before the Four Year War, which was just prior to TOS for us Star Trek history buffs. But although they're out at the edge of Federation space, they apparently have instantaneous real-time holographic communication! I couldn't help but think of how that would have slowed down the plot of so many TOS episodes if in every crisis they could call up Starfleet and ask what they should do.
My major problem with it is that I need likeable characters, people I can relate to. The three central characters are the captain, first officer and science officer, and there's come cute verbal banter between them, but the "star" of this show is obviously First Officer Michael Burnham -- a woman in spite of her name. But she's depicted as some kind of amazon superwoman raised by Vulcans after being orphaned by a Klingon "terrorist raid" when she was a child. She's insubordinate and thinks that she's always right, which makes her unlikeable to me. Anyway, why does the main character of every story these days have to have a "tragic past"? It makes the rest of us with regular lives feel like maybe we'd be too dull to be in the crew of a starship.
This is just my first impression, and I am constrained to point out that as I recall, my first impression of TNG was not favorable either. It wasn't until Season Two that TNG started to grow on me. I will give it a chance, but if this is just going to be another "Battlestar Galactica" with Klingons instead of Cylons, I will not be particularly interested.
But hey! Tell us what you think! I have no objection to people disagreeing with me. I'm not going to bite your head off.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Oct 2, 2017 7:54:38 GMT -6
Well, that's interesting. Episode 2 wasn't on CBS last night. I went to the show's official site this morning and found out that episode 3 supposedly premiered last night! So obviously this series is only available by Internet streaming. I guess that resolves my question of whether I'm going to bother watching it or not. Too bad.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jul 12, 2019 7:49:55 GMT -6
I finally got to see the second half of the Discovery premier, "The Battle at the Binary Stars". I got hold of the season one DVD set from my public library.
As I mentioned before, the plot was a little bit confusing. In a nutshell, the USS Shenzhou is sent to investigate a damaged subspace communications relay at the edge of Federation space, next to a pair of collapsing binary stars. (It seemed odd to me to put a communications relay where it will be bombarded by all that radiation and subspace distortion, but hey...) They can't decide whether the damage was deliberate or accidental, but they do manage to spot a strange artifact in orbit around one of the binary stars. Now they seem convinced that whoever left the artifact must have damaged the relay too. But because of all the debris and radiation from the binaries, it's far too dangerous to take the ship closer. Naturally Superwoman Burnham volunteers to go in just a thruster suit.
So she flies over there and lands on the artifact, which turns out to have Klingon markings. I think I mentioned that no one apparently has heard of the Klingons in a hundred years. Soon she is accosted by a full armed Klingon warrior wearing space armor and carried a plasma sword. What happens next is a little bit unclear, but to me it looks as if she activates her thruster suit to escape, bumps into this warrior and accidentally kills him!
Burnham wakes up three hours later in sickbay suffering from severe radiation sickness from her overexposure. Naturally Superwoman jumps out of her treatment pod and goes to the bridge to report. Then a Klingon ship uncloaks. Captain Georgiou immediately tries to talk to them, but the Klingon, T'kuvma (or something like that) is uncommunicative. The artifact suddenly lights up like a star, and this apparently is its function, to act as a communications beacon. Klingon ships begin to warp into the neighborhood.
Captain Georgiou reports this to higher echelons, and is told that reinforcements are on the way, but in the meantime to stand fast and do nothing to provoke a war. Meanwhile Burnham has ideas of her own. They have to attack immediately, she says, because that was what the Vulcans did a hundred years ago. The first time they met a Klingon ship, the Klingon blew the Vulcan ship away. Since then, every time they met a Klingon ship, the Vulcans shot first, and this earned them respect. And that was what the Shenzhou has to do now. When Georgiou refuses to do that, Burnham knocks her out with a Vulcan neck pinch and takes command, ordering the Shenzhou to open fire. Georgiou arrives on the bridge just in time to countermand the order and places Burnham in the brig.
Now the Starfleet reinforcements arrive. And here's another confusing bit. It seems that T'Kuvma's goal had been to reunite the 24 houses of the Klingons into an empire again, by picking a fight with the Federation. At first the other Klingons had laughed at him, calling him a misfit and so on, and told him to crawl back under his rock, or words to that effect. But when Starfleet arrives they change their mind and start fighting anyway. In the battle the Starfleet ships are slaughtered, the Klingons declare victory and most of them depart.
However T'Kuvma's ship is still there. He starts using a tractor beam to pick up the dead Klingons who are floating in space, and suddenly Captain Georgiou (in the disabled Shenzhou) decides that she can put a photon torpedo in a shuttlecraft and send it over and cripple his ship. At this point Burnham (having escaped from the brig) has another brilliant tactical idea. If they kill T'Kuvma, they'll only make him a martyr. It would be better to take him prisoner. So they put the warhead into one of the dead bodies and let the Klingons tractor it on board. It explodes and disables the ship, and Georgiou and Burnham beam over ALONE, to work their way through a ship full of Klingons and capture the captain.
If it had been Kirk and Spock, they probably would have pulled it off, but this is 2017, and we can't have a happy ending. They fail, Georgiou is killed and Burnham barely escapes with her life. The final scene is her court martial, where she is sentenced to life in prison for dereliction of duty and mutiny.
The third episode, "Context is for Kings" picks up six months later, when Burnham is on a prison shuttle about to start her sentence. She is infamous throughout the Federation for being single-handedly responsible for starting the war with the Klingons and getting over 8,000 Starfleet officers killed. Which is completely unjust. Although technically guilty of mutiny, it was short-lived. Her order to fire was countermanded. And the Klingons attacked anyway. There is no rational reason to blame her for that. But once again this is 2017. Apparently the writers of this show want to stress that Starfleet is corrupt and stupid, run by a bunch of complete buffoons.
I could go on and describe how the USS Discovery finally makes its appearance, and Captain Gabriel Lorca highjacks the prison shuttle to get his hands on Burnham, then forces her to join his crew, but I'll spare you that. I completely lost interest halfway through episode three. I'm not going to bother criticizing it. The show seems to be exactly in tune with the kind of stuff I see on television all the time these days. I understand that Star Trek Discovery is still going strong, beginning its fourth season, where the ship ends up 900 years in the future or something. It's probably very interesting if you get into it. To me it just seems like my worst fear came to pass. It's another Battlestar Galactica with Klingons instead of Cylons.
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Atoz 77
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Post by Atoz 77 on Jul 15, 2019 7:44:50 GMT -6
Now a lot of you are probably reading this and thinking, "There's that old fuddy-duddy who doesn't like anything new and -- big surprise! -- he took an instant dislike to Discovery. Who cares what he thinks?" Well, fair enough. I admit that I did take an instant dislike to Michael Burnham, and that colored my attitude toward that entire first episode. The first season DVD set has four discs with a total of fifteen episodes. I watched the first three discs, and I am happy to say that the character did become more likeable over time. The tough, Vulcan façade melted away pretty quickly and she became more human. So that's an improvement. I'm still not enamored of the show as a whole, though.
To me it has the feel of a soap opera, or better yet one of those novels where each chapter is written by a different author. Instead of each episode representing a story on its own, the season as a whole is one long, convoluted story. Each episode represents a chapter in that story. I'm sure that most of you are familiar with that format by now since a lot of television shows follow the same format. And to be fair, that's probably the only way a science fiction series can survive these days. When you think about it, all the good short science fiction stories have probably already been told (either on Star Trek or The Outer Limits or Stargate or somewhere), so novel-length stories are the only way to go. The advantage of this format is obvious. Instead of coming up with 15 totally original science fiction plots every season, all the writers have to do is put their heads together and come up with one BIG plot, then throw in a lot of twists and cliffhangers.
The disadvantage is that every episode has to hold and keep the viewer's interest on its own. The overall plot has to move just fast enough that the viewer doesn't feel like he's wasting his time. That's where it falls down. (That's how I lost interest in Lost, Heroes, Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine.) I was binge-watching the whole season of Discovery in one week, but there were individual episodes that disappointed me so badly (yes, I'm thinking of Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd) that if I had had to wait a week for the next installment, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have written it off. In fact I had plenty of time to watch those last three episodes before I had to return the DVD's to the library, but I didn't bother. So I still don't know how the story came out. And it doesn't bother me that I don't know. (shrug)
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