Discovery Trailer

[Morrus]

I still love this show. It's the show I look forward to most each week; I wake up on Monday mornings excited for it. I'm going to really miss it when it ends.

 

[Jester David]

I'm trying to limit my contributions to this thread to things that don't tear "Discovery" a new one, as I don't like it and am no longer watching it

I almost stopped.
Really, the sole reason I kept watching was out of a morbid desire to see how it ends and to generate content for the Star Trek Adventures RPG on the Continuing Mission fan site.

I would have loved to see his version of the show. But I can see how that structure would have raised the show's cost from "a big gamble" to "inarguably prohibitive". Each season being a commentary and expansion of a different era of Trek, complete with its one theme/set of themes could have been fantastic.

Given the budget given to the show it wouldn't have been impossible. It wouldn't look as good (i.e. movie quality like the current series, but it would have been decent.
But having to continually recast and lose the character momentum would be tricky.

Another persistent problem with the Discovery we actually got is it has no answer to the question: why is it a prequel to TOS? Absent the original plan for the series, there really isn't one.

Nostalgia.
I think they assumption was that the Kirk era was the most well known and most popular era of Trek. It allowed them to namedrop familiar characters, like Sarek and Spock. And, presumably, required the least audience familiarity.
(Although, honestly, I think TNG and that era is arguably just as popular and well known.)


It makes me miss Roddenberry, who was pretty insistent TNG introduce new aliens rather than just coast with old favourites.


They could just have easily positioned the story in 2130 and said it was 25 years before TOS. Or placed it in 2300-2350 and had it between the TOS films and TNG.
Instead of Klingons it could have featured the gorn or tholians and still had a classic enemy feel without stepping on established lore. Or a brand new enemy, which would make it more suspenseful over the idea of Starfleet potentially scourging the planet. But they *really* wanted to milk that nostalgia.

That's what keeps me interested. Despite the missteps and bad plotting/writing, I am legitimately surprised by something pretty much every episode. I didn't expect from a Trek show. Case in point, I was somewhat disappointed by the final episode in the Mirror Universe, but I didn't see Burnham saving/kidnapping Empress Georgiou coming - prolly should have, but didn't.

It's surprising, but they're very rarely good surprises. Most often they're surprises in a “WTF are they thinking?” vein. Like saving the emperor.


There's predictive text TNG scripts out there, and I never have any idea where they're going either. But I don't think they're good.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I still understand the desire for prequels. The audience needs to bring less insight knowledge about the setting, even if the authors might still need to keep its in mind, lest zealous fans accuse them of violating canon. And it's also the time where the Federation still seems really vulnerable.

Voyager basically single-highhandedly crippled the Borg, and before that, the Dominion was stopped, even at great cost and with some interference of god-like aliens.

That means the Federation has gotten really strong and is a total powerhouse in the galaxy.
Sure, you can let another new alien come by and say "and these guys are even tougher than the last ones". But it seems that's just like a form of power creep and something you've done before.
And it also kinda feels like it's invalidating the past successes.
That seems to be what the Star Wars sequels did. "Oh yeah, the Empire was destroyed, but we have the First Order now, and they have a super-weapon that's even more destructive than the one the Death Star had, and they also have a superpowerful Dark Sider.) MAybe fitting for a setting with a "Summon Bigger Fish" spell.


Ultimately, nothing that happened in Discovery so far really contradicts canon. It expands on it. We absolutely don't know if there was a war against the Klingons before or not. We don't really know how far their conflicts went, or how dangerous the Klingons were. And we know the Klingons didn't seem very honorable in TOS, and that there were divisions along house lines and internal strife.

And while the war seemed to have been grand, the losses overall are not that extreme - the colonies being destroyed seem to have only populations in a few thousands apparently. Starfleet and the Klingon Forces are not massive, we're nowhere close to the Dominion War levels of warfare. The Battle of the Binary Stars still seems to be the biggest fight they had.
And that would seem consistent with canon as well.

 

[Mallus]

But having to continually recast and lose the character momentum would be tricky.

Yeah, the anthology format would have made casting much harder. Plus, there would have been pressure to keep any fan-favorite/breakout characters for more than one season.

Nostalgia.
I think they assumption was that the Kirk era was the most well known and most popular era of Trek. It allowed them to namedrop familiar characters, like Sarek and Spock. And, presumably, required the least audience familiarity.
(Although, honestly, I think TNG and that era is arguably just as popular and well known.)

I'd say in 2018, more people are nostalgic for TNG-era Trek (cf. The Orville). I say this as someone who grew up w/TOS. I still believe the driving factor was Fuller's desire to tell a story about a battle for the Federation's soul prior to the Age of Kirk. Which helped lay the foundation for not only TOS-era Trek, but for the more-utopic and unitard-forward TNG period.

Though I may think that because I don't feel much nostalgia in Discovery. For every callback and nod there are deliberate attempts at being "things you've never seen in Star Trek before".

Instead of Klingons it could have featured the gorn or tholians and still had a classic enemy feel without stepping on established lore.

I don't think they're stepping on established lore too badly, but honestly I'd be fine with it if they were. I'm not looking for the creative team to "honor Star Trek". I want them to use whatever bits of the canon they find interesting and make something new. And hopefully good. But if making good art were easy everyone would do it.

Most often they're surprises in a “WTF are they thinking?” vein. Like saving the emperor.

I loved that. It was so stupid. And human. If you're going to indulge in the more operatic aspects of space opera, you could do worse than have a protagonist kidnap-save their evil doppleganger mother figure from a parallel universe.

There's predictive text TNG scripts out there, and I never have any idea where they're going either.

Well, I think Discovery is better written than something spit out by a neural network or a Markov Chain generator or some such. I'll stand by an earlier assessment; unevenness aside, it's the strongest first season of a Star Trek series since the 1966-67 television season.

 

[Morrus]

Plus anthologies mean you can’t reuse sets, which is a major cost.

 

[MarkB]

This is one of the ways -- intentionally or not, though I'm pretty sure it is, mostly -- Star Trek (including but not limited to Discovery) winds up being realistic.

There is a large gap between the stated Klingon identity and their actions. In other words, like every other group, their cultural/historical narrative is at least partially a lie they tell themselves (and others). Frequently disproven by the actual historical record.

TNG makes this pretty clear. A lot of what we hear about Klingons comes from Worf, the guy raised by human parents in the Federation. An idealized, at best second-hand version of who they are. Contrast that with the machinations surrounding the Klingon succession, the Duras sisters, the Khitomer cover-up, etc. The audience sees the Klingon relationship to honor is... complicated.

Indeed, and DS9 took this to it's logical conclusion, showing that the contradiction between the race's sense of personal honour and their empire's foundation of cover-ups and face saving was tearing them apart culturally. It looked like they were back on a better path by the end of the series, but they've always had that disconnect between honour and glory - between personal integrity and public reputation. This era was just a time in their history where glory was the driving force.

 

[Hussar]

There's another issue to think of as well.

This is the first Trek meant for an international audience.

Even ST:Enterprise came out before streaming was a thing. There was no Netflix. There was no on-demand video back then. Star Trek, in all its incarnations was an American show meant for American audiences. Sure, everyone else could watch too, but, the bread and butter (as far as the network was concerned) was the local market.

And, frankly, Star Trek was never all that popular. It has its strong following, but, it's not like it was dominating prime time network TV at pretty much any point.

But, now, STiscovery is being broadcast pretty much everywhere. In multiple languages at the same time. I get my version, in Japanese if I want it, at exactly the same time as everyone else.

I'd argue that because of that, adherence to canon that very, very few of the audience is even aware of (how many Japanese viewers do you think watched TOS?), they can get away with being a lot more fast and loose with earlier canon. The newer viewers don't really have any connection to that old canon. So, for them, THIS is what Klingons look like (and trying to present Klingons in blackface is pretty much going to insult the hell out of a lot of potential audience).

People tend to forget that Star Trek Beyond did the best of any Star Trek movie in China. It actually did very, very well. For those viewers, Kirk is Chris Pine and Star Trek has lots of action and explosions. To then turn around and in the premier season of the new Trek show go back to "endless meetings in board rooms" style TNG Trek would be the fastest way to lose that potential audience.

 

[Kaodi]

I, for one, am loving this turn with former Emperor Georgiou becoming Captain Georgiou. It makes sense in a desperate situation to induct her into Starfleet, even if under a kind of false pretense. She is evil to the core, but having been the leader of an extremely (successful) militaristic empire probably means that she even when constrained by Starfleet morality she is by far the strongest military commander available to them. And, story wise, it essentially allows them to continue Lorca's mean bastard captain plot with the contrivance out in the open and without actually having to forgive Lorca.

And, Christ, who was NOT disappointed when Michelle Yeoh died in episode 2 and we thought that was all we were going to see of her?

 

[Jester David]

I'd argue that because of that, adherence to canon that very, very few of the audience is even aware of (how many Japanese viewers do you think watched TOS?), they can get away with being a lot more fast and loose with earlier canon. The newer viewers don't really have any connection to that old canon. So, for them, THIS is what Klingons look like (and trying to present Klingons in blackface is pretty much going to insult the hell out of a lot of potential audience).

That just means they should avoid heavy use of canon.
That doesn't mean they should flagrantly contradict it. You can do a canon lite show that introduces concepts and skirts around the past, that creates new things rather than abusing the old.

And Discovery a pretty poor example of something that is canon lite. It references Enterprise twice. It brings in Klingons without introducing them, expecting you to care. It does the same thing for Vulcans. It name drops Sarek and Spock and Harry Mudd and the Defiant. It casually introduces concepts like mirror universes with little explanation, expecting people to know.
Heck, it doesn't even explain things like Starfleet, the Federation, transporters, warp drive, the prime directive, etc.

If the intent was a new show for new audiences they could have done soooooo much better.
But, that wasn't their intent. It was for Star Trek fans first, but the creator's just didn't care enough to really nail the lore.

(Which makes sense. The primary audience should be the fans. You can't dump them in favour of a potential audience of new fans, because that's not a guarantee of viewership.)

People tend to forget that Star Trek Beyond did the best of any Star Trek movie in China. It actually did very, very well. For those viewers, Kirk is Chris Pine and Star Trek has lots of action and explosions. To then turn around and in the premier season of the new Trek show go back to "endless meetings in board rooms" style TNG Trek would be the fastest way to lose that potential audience.

Star Trek Beyond was also funded by the Chinese megacorp Alibaba, via their film division Alibada Pictures. They likely advertised more locally to get a better return on their investment.

 

[Hussar]

Fair enough. But that also means that lots of people saw it. So they don’t have to explain a lot of these things because the movies already covered them.

I guess I just think that fan doesn’t necessarily mean middle aged dude that grew up in the eighties watching TNG.

It also doesn’t mean canon cop who judges a show based on how closely it adheres to what came before.


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