[Spoilers] Star Trek: Discovery - Discussion, Speculation and Tribbles

[Scott Archer]

I kinda felt like the third episode was yet another introductory episode, hopefully next week we actually properly get into the series.
Burnham was different this week, I feel like she's learnt her lesson and come back to her Starfleet values (which came across in her conversation with Lorca.)



Epic burns from Saru too although I feel like he's going to make a mistake at some point later in the series which puts the Captain at risk and he's somehow going to be brought through it by Burnham, thus giving him an understanding of what she went through.


I agree with what a friend of mine said, it feels a lot more 'grown-up' in the gritty sense than previous Trek series and I think it's going to continue along a darker theme, so it will be interesting to see how that all pans out.

[JSpaced10]

Burnham was different this week, I feel like she's learnt her lesson and come back to her Starfleet values (which came across in her conversation with Lorca.)

I disagree that she's "coming back to Starfleet values". She was always upholding Starfleet and the Federation's values, by trying to stop a conflict before it started.
Starfleet's language was not acceptable to these Klingons, in the same way that the Federation doesn't generally have a "friendly" headbutt in a bar. But if a Starfleet officer walked into a Klingon bar asked for a Babysham and started chatting about his kids' little league tournament, it would go badly. If the same officer walked in, downed a bloodwine and punched the biggest warrior he could find in the face, he would end the night with a blackeye, arm in arm with the Klingons singing songs.

Unfortunately Georgiou was hand-tied by Starfleet protocol and actually kind of prejudiced that the traditional way of peace was "the best way". Had Burnham been thirty seconds faster and fired the opening shot herself, the whole situation *may* have been different. She wasn't betraying Starfleet, so much as trying to implement its principles in a roundabout way.

I don't believe (until the final phaser shot on T'Kuvma's ship) she allowed her past with the Klingons to inform her decision.

When she nerve-pinched Georgiou, Burnham knew that no matter how her plan worked out, she would face court martial and be sentenced for assaulting a senior officer. Like Lorca though, she sees further than protocols and chain of command.

I liked her attitude in episode 3, accepting the weight of 8,000 lives lost, accepting the truth when people called her mutineer. But they were two separate issues.
People blame her for the war, but erroneously link her mutiny to it, rather than her failure to kidnap T'Kuvma. I'm not 100% convinced kidnapping T'Kuvma would have helped the situation, but it might have been some leverage. Had her mutiny succeeded, she may well have been sentenced to prison, but lauded as a hero for opening diplomatic relations with the Klingons.

[Grizz]

Star Trek Discovery is rad.

Fight me.

No don't, I'm a coward.

[Scott Archer]

Just watched episode 5 of Discovery and a couple of things:
1. Yay! Harry Mudd - I felt they got the chracterisation 100%
2. The list containing Pike, Decker and April was quite nice. I wasn't 100% sure where it would fit in Pike wise but according to Memory Alpha, Pike had just finished his 5 year mission so I guess it makes sense him being on the list. That being said, I 100% want to see a modern VFX take on the Constitution class which is a little closer to the original than in the abramsverse - after all, Enterprise is fighting this war too. (It was nice to see Archer there too - in fact some sources suggest hew could still be alive, that would be pretty awesome if we saw him.)
3. They resolved the moral dilema of the Tardigrade (be interesting to see where it goes from here.)

[Grizz]

Against the wishes of YouTube comments everywhere, CBS has renewed Discovery for Season 2!

[Shoot]

Against the wishes of YouTube comments everywhere, CBS has renewed Discovery for Season 2!

Awesome, I actually enjoy Discovery a lot.

[Martin Thompson]

Episode 7 (this monday) was by far my favourite so far. I really liked the fact they pulled in Mudd's character to have that small link with TOS, picking one of their more (atleast by name) memorable "antagonists". The fresh take on the classic (and one of my personal favourites) kind of Sci-Fi plot was really really good. I'm always a sucker for these kind of time-loop things. Voyager did it brilliantly in Year of Hell (granted that wan't really a loop so much as a switching of timelines, but thats why it was so brilliant), but this Discovery episode took it back to the classic TNG-esque kind of basic plots but filmed it in such a way it felt new and fresh.

I'm starting to like the show better every episode, especially the more "trek" like "single plot" episodes are my favourites so far. I agree with scott that it was a nice "cameo" to have Johnathan Archer on that list there (I was actually looking out for such small reference details since I'm quite the sucker for them anyway).

The'res just 2 things that are bothering me at the moment:

1. The entire premise of the ship: the spore drive. I mean, Voyager anyone? "Hey Kathryn, you remember that verry successfull experment we ran back in the 2250's? Maybe you could use that one to get back?"

2. Where are all those weird aliens coming from? Saru? Whats his race now? And that wierd android-looking comm officer? Wasn't Data the first android to serve on a Starfleet vessel? They are playing a bit high and loose with some of the details IMHO. I'm sure there are some fans who have some kind of overly-difficult way of explaining this away. Seeing as Grizz is our ret-con queen, whats your take on this?

But, its nice to hear a seaosn 2 is on the way! I havnt read much about it myself (mainly since most american "news" sites which write about this hire writers with super convoluted writing styles and have websites with just too many adds) so its nice to see it here. Hopefully they get to ride it out all the way to Kithomer! (though that would mean another 40-ish seasons XD)

Also, episode 3, tribble, yay!

[Grizz]

1. The entire premise of the ship: the spore drive. I mean, Voyager anyone? "Hey Kathryn, you remember that verry successfull experment we ran back in the 2250's? Maybe you could use that one to get back?"

2. Where are all those weird aliens coming from? Saru? Whats his race now? And that wierd android-looking comm officer? Wasn't Data the first android to serve on a Starfleet vessel? They are playing a bit high and loose with some of the details IMHO. I'm sure there are some fans who have some kind of overly-difficult way of explaining this away. Seeing as Grizz is our ret-con queen, whats your take on this?

There's not much to say about the first point as one has to assume the show is going to address why the spore drive - and indeed the Discovery as a whole - fails / isn't adopted. At the moment its use is already very dodgy. Part of the reason I like the show is that they haven't let it being a prequel (though it's really a sequel to Enterprise) stop them from introducing new things. As it should be - and this includes different species. So we haven't seen other Kelpians in Starfleet in the future - doesn't matter - we didn't hear of Betazoids in TOS yet a reference was slipped in to The Undiscovered Country to tie in to their establishment in TNG. They were there all along, honest!

The spore drive officer (Airiam) has been labelled an Augmented Human, I believe. On which front I also still like that we got to see Keyla pre-augment on the Shenzhou before she was wounded. Nice little detail. Not every injury can be cured with a wave of a glowing tool yet, it seems.

[Martin Thompson]

There's not much to say about the first point as one has to assume the show is going to address why the spore drive - and indeed the Discovery as a whole - fails / isn't adopted. At the moment its use is already very dodgy. Part of the reason I like the show is that they haven't let it being a prequel (though it's really a sequel to Enterprise) stop them from introducing new things. As it should be - and this includes different species. So we haven't seen other Kelpians in Starfleet in the future - doesn't matter - we didn't hear of Betazoids in TOS yet a reference was slipped in to The Undiscovered Country to tie in to their establishment in TNG. They were there all along, honest!

The spore drive officer (Airiam) has been labelled an Augmented Human, I believe. On which front I also still like that we got to see Keyla pre-augment on the Shenzhou before she was wounded. Nice little detail. Not every injury can be cured with a wave of a glowing tool yet, it seems.

The drive will probably encouter the same fate as the Transwarp engine of the Excelsior, it woulnt only be more then logical.

As for the aliens, the new aliens in TNG could be pretty well explained by only having joined the Federation some years after TOS, that would explain them not being present in the "old" series. I still think its wierd that there are aliens who have been in the Federation for years but we still have never ever seen, even not on DS9, a show on a large space station where hundreds of species where present at any given day.

[Grizz]

Incidentally, Doug Jones himself has also raised the question: "What happened to the Kelpiens?"

So maybe we'll just have to be patient 

I still think its wierd that there are aliens who have been in the Federation for years but we still have never ever seen, even not on DS9, a show on a large space station where hundreds of species where present at any given day.

Gotta differentiate between the Federation and Starfleet, I think. The Kelpien homeworld, for example, is said to be beyond Federation space, so there may well not be many knocking around - least because they're all too busy being hunted and possibly eaten. There are details on how Saru came to be an officer, but that's for novel readers... or perhaps even the next episode which I believe is Saru-centric.

There have been plenty of unidentifiable Alien extras mulling about in the background over the years. The galaxy is a big place. Either way, I think it's fair for the creators of a Star Trek show in 2017 to take some liberties, but I know there are those out there who just wanted to see what we've seen before with a fresh coat of paint or stick rigidly to a canon which has never been solid to start with.

I would perhaps be asking more questions myself if I wasn't enjoying it so much. As it is - I liked it to begin with and it's getting better every week.

[Grizz]

Definitely going to feel this going away until January  Such a well produced piece of entertainment and quite relieved it's going to be around for a while.

I like that they make sure you're paying attention...

[spoiler]...otherwise it would be quite easy to miss something like Lorca overriding the spore jump coordinates - amid many other certain things alluded to during this episode.WE ELITE FORCE NOW.[/spoiler]

[JSpaced10]

@Grizz Is THAT what he was doing? Ooh, I did wonder.
I really like the show. It's very Trek and very new at the same time and I loved the climactic bridge battle.
There's a couple of theories about Tyler, including for and against those theories, so I'm looking forward to finding out what his deal is.

[spoiler]I did NOT need to know what Klingon boobies look like. And now I do. I think I'll survive, but this is again, not a Trek I can share with my kids.[/spoiler]

[Scott Archer]

I felt like Discovery was starting to find it's feet in the last few episodes (I need to watch them all again before January ) And I was a fan of the ending twist.


I think the spore drive will either lead to a tragic accident (or has already caused one) and will then be classified and hidden away, so those on Voyager and in the future wouldn't know about. Similar to what happened with the phase cloak in TNG, the captured cloak in tos or the transwarp drive on the Excelsior.


Species wise, I think new trek will always introduce new species - I mean we had the Denobulans and the Xindi in Enterprise.


I also agree with MT, that was a classic Trek story line and I felt they executed it really well.




I think season 2 was always going to happen, as season 1 was pretty much paid for by Netflix

[Grizz]

Thank you, Jonathan Frakes, for delivering "Despite Yourself" to me.

[Scott Archer]

Thank you, Jonathan Frakes, for delivering "Despite Yourself" to me.

Ditto, as soon as I saw him listed as Director, I knew we were in for a good episode (and it was fantastic, if not the best yet)