Brontoforumus

"can you create an optimistic tv show in 2017?"

"If i did I'd be bluffing"

Lie to me, baby.

Episode 4:

Michael, I'm sorry that I called you an impulsive idiot. Clearly you were just trying to fit in.

Man, her being an empathetic, caring soul who understands animals is so completely out of left field it's amazing. I love the fact that Michael uses Saru as a tool to gauge whether or not her captive murderbeast is intentionally threatening, just to prove to everyone that she's more empathetic than they are. Ugh.

One scene dovetailed into pure shlock: Landry takes out a knife and a gun, doesn't explain what she's doing until she opens up Ripper's pen, ineffectively shoots it with "one of the most dangerous weapons in the universe" inside the science bay packed with bones and artifacts and super dangerous weaponry, chases it up the wall, then is instantly killed when it falls on her and eats her face. Boy howdy.

Klingon stuff was weird. It's really starting to grate on me how labored their speech is through the makeup. Can't believe we have to sit through entire scenes of this.

One thing I fucking loved: Every time Discovery uses the spore drive. The visuals of the ship folding in on itself with space itself was fucking awesome. It's an absolute treat to see this drive being used.

Mothra wrote:One scene dovetailed into pure shlock: Landry takes out a knife and a gun, doesn't explain what she's doing until she opens up Ripper's pen, ineffectively shoots it with "one of the most dangerous weapons in the universe" inside the science bay packed with bones and artifacts and super dangerous weaponry, chases it up the wall, then is instantly killed when it falls on her and eats her face. Boy howdy.

Yeah, that ran well past Idiot Ball territory and into "No part of this makes any kind of sense." How did someone this impulsive and incompetent survive this long, let alone be considered some kind of tactical genius and get promoted to whatever the fuck her job is?

Not that she was a good character in the first damn place, but I figured they'd give her an arc where she became more sympathetic. Apparently that's what Science Guy is for.

I do think there's potential to a Star Trek series where the captain is clearly the villain. So there's that.

Had a thought with the mirror de-sync shot at the end: Would be rad if we were IN the Terran Empire mirror universe right now, and this war details how they become cruel and powerful.

That would certainly make a lot more sense.

That's already my headcanon for the Kelvin Timeline.

I finally watched Beyond. It's probably my favorite of the three because it follows pretty decent Planet of the Week formula, has some of the best sci-fi visuals I've seen in years (Yorktown in particular legitimately made me elicit an audible "wow"), and corny as it is I actually loved the use of Sabotage.

The Yorktown is one of the single coolest things Star Trek's ever done.

It's visually stunning, and immediately conjures ideas of what life is like there, etc. I would read a book about life on that station. The shot of the Enterprise visibly moving under a public reflecting pool is fucking breathtaking.

Honestly I really enjoyed the whole movie. The crew and their relationships were believable and interesting, the planet reminded me a bit of World War Hulk, where you've got all these weird refugees from everywhere. I kind of wish the movie had been more about that aspect, honestly. This warlord stealing ships and crews, resulting in this bizarre hodgepodge that the crew would have to navigate sounds a lot more interesting than what they did, but it also sounds like a five hour movie, so maybe not.

All around it was a lot of fun.

Had a thought with the mirror de-sync shot at the end: Would be rad if we were IN the Terran Empire mirror universe right now, and this war details how they become cruel and powerful.

That would be rad as fuck, and an amazing twist that nobody could possibly see coming (except you, I guess) but sadly, the canonical start point/divergence for the Mirror Universe was shown already in Enterprise.

Remember the TNG movie First Contact, when Zephram Cochrane first meets the Vulcans after they land on earth when they detect his Warp Flight?

In the Mirror Universe, he instead kills them and boards their ship to steal all the tech.

And then the Terrans take control of a bunch of planets and enslave all the non-humans, long before the Klingons show up. And then EMPRESS HOSHI.

That sounds like a way better version of Enterprise.

It had an alternate intro sequence and everything.

I went looking. Turns out the episode sucks and is stupid in all the ways Enterprise was always fucking stupid, but that intro was awesome anyway.

It's not that great of an episode (two parter) but it does do some interesting things:

1. It's entirely (well, okay, almost) self-contained: There are no regular universe characters in the mirror universe, and no mirror characters in the regular universe. It's just a story about some events that happened in the mirror.

2. The history of Earth in the Star Trek Universe is that after WWIII (which killed billions) the Vulcans landed and this event, coupled with the horrors of WWIII, caused humanity to take a hard left into pacifism and exploration and diplomacy, becoming the Idealistic Federation we all know. The Mirror universe basically has humanity taking a hard right instead, becoming insanely warlike and cruel. In reality, of course, humanity would probably just continue down the middle path. But it's noteworthy that up till the Vulcans landed, Mirror and Regular Universe shared the exact same history.

3. Regarding "almost" self contained: The episode is a continuation of sorts of the TOS episode "The Tholian Web" and the Constitution Class Starship USS Defiant shows up after being lost in the TOS episode and thrown backward in time and into the Mirror Universe. The creaters took pains to recreate the bridge of the Defiant exactly the way Kirk and co had discovered it, with all the corpses in the exact same locations. Of course, The Defiant represents a massive leap forward in tech for the Mirror Universe at the time, which is the focus of the episode. Eventually Hoshi gains command of the ship and uses it to threaten earth and take over as Empress.

It's insane that anything gets done in that episode. There's more backstabbing than in TF2... FRIDAY. I kid, I usually shot you

The care they took with the Defiant was fucking amazing though. They completely reconstructed the ship, and did some really wonderful effects to make it all fit together. I also loved how they sold a Constitution class ship as a fucking doomsday device compared to the ships available in the era.

Enjoyed this last ep of Discovery quite a bit. Feel like this show's out of weeds now.

Couldn't help but notice the engineer's dropping a lot of "groovy"s and "far out"s now that he's beheld the unified consciousness of all living things. Would be cool if they used 60's terms in this, as if the 60's era of the original series was canon culturally for the Federation. They had this throwaway line in the DS9 ep with the tribbles, where Dax commented on how colorful everything was, and Sisko was like, "it was an experimental time" and sorta waxed nostalgic about the 60's.

Also: Glad the admiral's back.

There's more backstabbing than in TF2... FRIDAY. I kid, I usually shot you

my team had a hard time understanding that in order to kill Bal, you had to shoot him in the Norondor, ok

Strike down my Norondor and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. For a time.