Star Trek TV

[SeanDMan]

Terrible news. Really good actor, he was great as House as well.

[Hobo]

It didn't seem to get very widely mentioned but DC Fontana died last week too.

[K]

1 hour ago, Hobo said:

It didn't seem to get very widely mentioned but DC Fontana died last week too.

And Marina Sirtis' husband

[GoGo Yubari]

Finished Discovery S2 because I thought I was beating the clock on my CBS All Access sub and I fucked it up, it had already renewed itself as of today. I thought it was fine but season 1 coalesced into a much stronger story, some of what kept me at bay here was probably that it's a damn time travel story and I hate time travel stories. Loved Anson Mount as Pike.

Star Wars TROS spoiler behind the cut:

Spoiler

I did laugh at the fact that they pulled off the "hey, a bunch of other characters from earlier in the story are here to turn the tide against the the enemy ships" beat earlier this year and better this year than The Rise of Skywalker did.

 

[RazorsEdge]

3 hours ago, GoGo Yubari said:

Finished Discovery S2 because I thought I was beating the clock on my CBS All Access sub and I fucked it up, it had already renewed itself as of today. I thought it was fine but season 1 coalesced into a much stronger story, some of what kept me at bay here was probably that it's a damn time travel story and I hate time travel stories. Loved Anson Mount as Pike.

Star Wars TROS spoiler behind the cut:

  Reveal hidden contents

I did laugh at the fact that they pulled off the "hey, a bunch of other characters from earlier in the story are here to turn the tide against the the enemy ships" beat earlier this year and better this year than The Rise of Skywalker did.

 

I think I enjoyed season 2 but it says something that I vividly remember season 1 with only 1 viewing and don't remember what happened in season 2 so much that I'll probably have to re-watch before season 3. I don't like the time travel stories either so maybe that's what put me off a bit too. I think I'm looking forward to Picard more that season 3 of Discovery.

[Benji]

Finally caught up on Season 2...

Spoiler

I preferred season one, but I liked it and feel like it still has a lot of room to grow.

 

The Good

• I did adore Anson Mount as Pike and I am delighted to see him pull back from the failure of Inhumans.
• The Section 31 stuff was generally great too, I feel like they've done a good job expanding that element of Starfleet, and I could honestly watch a show dedicated to that sort of show in the Trek universe.
• Saru continues to be the highlight of the show for me, and his continued evolution intruiges me, I feel like there's a lot of potential with him and his species.
• Tig Notaro absolutely killed it as the engineer lady I forgot the name of. If we can replace Stamets with her, it wouldn't be the worst thing, because whilst he's a decent character, he is nothing compared to her. She gives me a proper Bones vibe.
• Spock was acceptably portrayed, but I don't really want him in it much more than he needs to be.

 

The Bad

• I didn't feel like the character work was as strong this season outside Saru.
• I've never really been the biggest fan of Star Trek's time travel stories, so this wasn't for me.
• I hate hate hate sci-fi over using the "they were dead but now OMG they're not" trope, and Discovery has abused this beyond reason. I know, at least two were mirror universes, and one we never actually saw die, and one died but was re-created by a spore or whatever, and one did die but is now a Klingon who got grafted into a human but still has the original guys memory and blah blah blah but it's absolutely more than enough. I don't care that it's done in different ways, I want it done with. Drama without stakes just ruins the drama, and they really need to stop that, because them killing people off was one of the first things I really appreciated about this version of Trek when it started.

 

[K]

Just finished watching Short Treks Season 2 in preparation for Picard dropping next week.

Really good stuff. I bet the twitter fans fucking hated the animated episodes, but I loved them. I've always pitched for a Star Trek series that is just random stories with no related characters, like one week we're with Earth's oceanography department, another we're at starfleet medical, next we're on Utopia Planitia, something like that. Short Treks seems to be the place to be able to do that. It's a shame they're only five-to-fifteen minutes, but utilising existing sets and animation and clever CGI and guest stars is a great way to grow the star trek universe without significant expenditure. 

Loved them.

[Colly]

Is Picard going to be released all at once or weekly? He says knowing his Prime trial ends in about three weeks...

[K]

6 hours ago, Colly said:

Is Picard going to be released all at once or weekly? He says knowing his Prime trial ends in about three weeks...

Weekly I guess. In the US it's on CBS, same as discovery

If you have family with prime, you can have two devices watching using one account. (Three if it's a different programme) I just set my partner up on mine last night so we could watch Picard

[stokeriño]

As the only member of my Trek-watching friends who has Amazon Prime, Picard is set to provide an excellent means to get them round my house for TV and pizza.

[Toe]

16 hours ago, K said:

Just finished watching Short Treks Season 2 in preparation for Picard dropping next week.

Really good stuff. I bet the twitter fans fucking hated the animated episodes, but I loved them. I've always pitched for a Star Trek series that is just random stories with no related characters, like one week we're with Earth's oceanography department, another we're at starfleet medical, next we're on Utopia Planitia, something like that. Short Treks seems to be the place to be able to do that. It's a shame they're only five-to-fifteen minutes, but utilising existing sets and animation and clever CGI and guest stars is a great way to grow the star trek universe without significant expenditure. 

Loved them.

That animated episode was awesome. I think it's probably my favourite of the Short Trek episodes so far.

Spoiler

When you saw the battered Enterprise squaring off against the Bird Of Prey, knowing that the Enterprise was about to be destroyed - it got to me. 

 

[9 to 5]

I have always wondered how much the general public in the Federation know about what goes on in space. Obviously they would know what wars are going etc but more in terms of space anomalies, god like creatures like Q and so on.

[K]

33 minutes ago, 9 to 5 said:

I have always wondered how much the general public in the Federation know about what goes on in space. Obviously they would know what wars are going etc but more in terms of space anomalies, god like creatures like Q and so on.

Jake worked for the Federation News Service for a while, and the last short Trek, that feeds into Picard, featured what was essentially a 'breaking news' show from the FNS complete with scrolling chyron. I imagine that as well as having people on site, like Jake was, they basically do the future version of scrolling through Twitter to scrape stories as well, reading unclassified logs to get stories. 

[9 to 5]

So, Picard eh?

Spoiler

That first scene was perfect and played with my heart somewhat.

 

[Toe]

I loved the first episode. I'm excited to see where the series goes from here. Might end up watching the first episode again tonight.

[K]

Just finished, loved it

[RazorsEdge]

It was awesome. It could've finished when he said the name of his dog and I would of still been happy. Patrick Stewart has not lost a beat.

[Lint]

Not sure how I felt about that

[Skummy]

I mostly loved it.

I'm not a big TNG guy - I've only seen a handful of episodes, and mostly know it through pop culture osmosis. I was actually chatting to someone a while back about doing a blog or podcast in which we watched and discussed every episode, with them being the "expert" and me the newbie, but it never got off the ground. So there'll be elements of this that aren't for me - I get the references, but they're not pulling on the heartstrings.

Patrick Stewart was magnificent, and I hope this is the pace it stays at - from when it was announced, I loved the idea of Patrick Stewart getting his teeth into an extended character study of Picard in his dotage. I don't want to see it turn into big intergalactic adventures, because to me that misses the point of it being about reckoning with his legacy and age.

While the show looks absolutely stunning, my main criticism was that the costuming and a lot of the set dressing doesn't feel like a Star Trek future. When it came to Starfleet uniforms, Roddenbury put so much thought into ideas of what clothing would look like in the future, yet apparently back on Earth in 2399 everyone's wearing American Apparel fleeces, and Picard's doing the tie knot from the Matrix. 

Similarly, there's a conversation where the two historical frames of reference brought up are the Pyramids and Dunkirk, which irked me. You mean to say that in the subsequent 400 years, and after centuries of space travel, intergalactic warfare and seismic shifts in our understanding of the universe, the historical reference points quickest to come to mind would conveniently be two readily understood by a viewing audience in the early 21st century? It's something that always takes me out of future-set sci-fi, and with the Dunkirk analogy in particular felt like the show didn't have faith in the audience to understand the stakes of what they were talking about without making a real world comparison. 

I enjoyed it, though, and will definitely keep watching.

[stokeriño]

28 minutes ago, Skummy said:

Similarly, there's a conversation where the two historical frames of reference brought up are the Pyramids and Dunkirk, which irked me. You mean to say that in the subsequent 400 years, and after centuries of space travel, intergalactic warfare and seismic shifts in our understanding of the universe, the historical reference points quickest to come to mind would conveniently be two readily understood by a viewing audience in the early 21st century? It's something that always takes me out of future-set sci-fi, and with the Dunkirk analogy in particular felt like the show didn't have faith in the audience to understand the stakes of what they were talking about without making a real world comparison. 

I didn't mind this. The Pyramids are currently about 4,500 years old and are a good reference for us, so there's no reason they shouldn't be an equally good reference to make 500 years later.

Dunkirk is slightly trickier, but I'd say it works on the basis of a) the interviewer didn't have a clue what he was talking about, b) Picard is a history nerd, c) Picard is THE MOST ENGLISH FRENCHMAN EVER and so a bit of history about Brits evacuating from France seems appropriate.

But even if this hadn't been the case, I'm happy to make allowances for the show trying to explain itself to its 21st century audience. Hell, it's not that different from the simple metaphor trope of "What if we [technobabble]?" "Just like letting the air out of a balloon!" that Trek traditionally adores.

Anyway: I watched ep 1 yesterday and I liked it too. It's mostly trying to just be intriguing at the moment, and that's fine.

Spoiler

Loved the tie-in of Maddox and 'The Measure of a Man' from TNG. Found the final scene quite funny because the reveal of them being in a Borg-ish-looking Cube struck me as hilarious if you didn't know the Trek context. "OH MY GOD THEY'RE IN SOMETHING THAT'S SQUARE."