33 thoughts on “Star Trek Discovery”

  1. You knew it had to be bad when they called it STD…

    The Orville is the best Star Trek show I’ve seen since Kirk, though people keep telling me DS9 was the best and I haven’t seen much of it so maybe I’ve missed out. It has its ‘woke’ moments, but they’re not shoved in your face.

    2. “Star Trek”, all series, was serious sci-fi drama. Orville is, IMO, struggling to define itself as either sci-fi or comedy or some mixture thereof. I hope they come down more on the side of serious sci-fi. The sophomoric “humor” is wearing thin with me.

      1. McFarlane clearly has a streak of Trek fanboy informing the show, but sophomoric humor is what he does in pretty much everything he writes, so it’s unavoidable.

        In the last few months I read something about a Trek sitcom but McFarlane’s already got that covered IMO.

      2. At least half the major cast of Orville seem to be decidedly comedic characters. But they keep finding themselves in dramatic situations, and rising to the challenge.

  2. Last Star Trek movie I saw had as its theme the complete twaddle that “diversity is our strength”. Barf.
    Can’t stand much of movie or TV science fiction, including “The Expanse which has a major, major science screwup regarding Ceres.
    However I’m currently reading ” Multiverse: The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson”. greg bear and others got together to write stories set in some of Poul’s worlds. Loving it. Recommended. Go buy it and spend some time with old friends.

  3. I never really liked TNG but the moment the Diana character said, “We celebrate diversity” I shut it off.

    The follow on shows never captured me for a moment.

    The newer movies with Chris Pine aren’t too bad though they are deteriorating with regard to story.

    And I did kind of like the TNG movie “First Contact”.

    But I’ve essentially given up on Trek.

  4. What I understand about Star Trek Discovery is that they believe diversity is a strength, except for those Klingons MAGA people who should be attacked on sight simply because they exist.

    In the meantime, there is Orville which can be seen for free on the broadcast network.

  5. Nothing we are seeing with STAR TREK: DISCOVERY is unexpected given what we’ve seen of TREK’s steady political degeneration through the years. Really, how could a 2018 STARK TREK *not* be woke?

    Timothy Sandefur’s essay in 2015 at the Claremont Review of Books still stands strong: “Over nearly 50 years, Star Trek tracked the devolution of liberalism from the philosophy of the New Frontier into a preference for non-judgmental diversity and reactionary hostility to innovation, and finally into an almost nihilistic collection of divergent urges. At its best, Star Trek talked about big ideas, in a big way. Its decline reflects a culture-wide change in how Americans have thought about the biggest idea of all: mankind’s place in the universe.”

    Link: https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-politics-of-star-trek/

    OF course, even Roddenberry’s New Frontier liberalism had some of these contradictions baked in; it was inevitable in any case that as American liberalism’s center of gravity shifted further left, so too would TREK’s worldview.

    I second the motion that if you want the old TREK formula in a new bottle, go watch THE ORVILLE. STAR TREK is an exhausted franchise, debilitated by an exhausted political project.

    1. I don’t get the Orville / Trek comparisons. In which Trek series was the crew comprised of seemingly incompetent adolescents? That’s the impression the Orville crew gives me. The only resemblance to Kirk’s Star Trek I see is the show being set aboard a starship.

      1. Well, it *is* a comedy, and more or less a spoof.

        If you want a sci-fi show that takes itself *seriously*, I’ don’t think there’s a show like the old STAR TREK out there right now (though I do think there are some very good, not painfully woke, sci-fi shows of other sorts worth watching).

      2. While the Trek series all had their hiccups, it was in the movies that they continually came across as incompetent, especially in the JJ Abrams lens-flare trilogy.

  6. I am sorry, did I say Star Trek Discovery was hauling garbage? What I meant to say is that it should be hauled away as garbage.

  7. STD is bad enough just for the “woke” crap. But it’s offensive for being completely disinterested in SciFi at all. Star Trek had its fair share of hand-wavy techno-nonsense, but nothing that didn’t fit in the far-future world they were imagining. STD has this idiotic “spore drive”, with a magical tardigrade, that somehow allows for instant travel anywhere. What’s worse, they probably stole the idea from a small indie game developer in Egypt.

    STD is awful. I fired up some Kirk and Picard episodes and felt better, but depressed that Star Trek is dead now thanks to stupid CBS flunkies.

    1. Picard is coming back though because Professor X thought the world needed help dealing with their emotions over Trump.

  8. I suppose it is worth noting here that all my favorite go-to shows seem to be going down the woke hell-hole at the same time: Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. Especially Doctor Who – criminy!

    While I don’t go in for conspiracies, I do think a lot of it is a result of the post-Trump “resistance” backlash and self-important “artists” feeling empowered and required to preach to the rest of us in various silly ways. They have even, seemingly, convinced themselves that all this valuetainment is what we really want. At some point, the corporate bean-counters (even the ones at the BBC) are going to be able to convince the executives that it really is hurting their bottom line and the grand wokeness will slow and the pendulum will start to swing back. Or the people who currently have been making wonderful fan films for YouTube will start making similarly-themed original series and movies, just like McFarlane.

    1. An essential element of “woke” appears to be that the bottom line doesn’t matter. Thus it is followed by going broke.

      1. The SJWs didn’t build it–nor could they, because they’re SJWs–so they don’t care. They find a successful media franchise, culturally-appropriate it, then wreck it. TV, movies, comics, video games, doesn’t matter so long as it’s popular.

        I’m not sure they’re even serious about the ‘woke’ message. I think they just enjoy wrecking it. They just love destroying love and beauty because they’ll never have any.

    2. The Star Wars decline is very interesting to me. It’s as if Disney purchased the IP for $4 Billion and then handed it over to Kathleen Kennedy to end it, because “War”. If I wanted to destroy a brand, I don’t think I could do it as effectively as her. They didn’t just destroy the expectation of the older fans, but they’ve written a dead-end story. The New Republic, which was the build up the previous 6 movies, was destroyed in one scene. Putting aside the weirdness of calling the ruling government’s military arm “The Resistance”; the fleet now consists of 1 old freighter and about 2 dozen members (according to the General Leia at the end of the 8th movie). A deus ex machina event could occur to rally this feeble band to victory, yet they’ve already done that in the first two movies (Rey’s Mary Sue characterization and the new military value of hyperspace). Or they can just have the New Order take over, which would seemingly annoy both the old fans (the Empire wins after all and the noble struggle was for not) and new fans (the Nazis win after all and resistance is futile).

      2. All they really need to do is have Luke wake up at the beginning of the next movie and say ‘Han, I just had the most horrible dream…’

        Then start over.

        But they won’t. Because SJWs always double-down.

        1. A great example of Kennedy wasting Disney’s $4 billion purchase of the IP is the handling of Luke’s character. He effectively had no role in TFA other than as a McGuffin. In TLJ; there was just enough screen time to effectively wipe away everything that made the original character iconic.

          The sad part is the one deleted scene where Luke pranks Rey would have improved the movie in many ways.

      3. TFA was a nice bit of fan service but left people thinking, “Haven’t we seen this before?” TLJ was the place to build character and the new story but instead there was no character development and no great story telling.

        Soylo lacked creativity and it was distracting when Lando and his feminist robot were joking around about having sex. The unintended error of having a feminist robot (NPC) screaming her programmed lines. But now we know why the Millenium Falcon is so temperamental, it had the brain of the feminist NPC installed.

        I don’t mind when a movie has themes that run counter to my beliefs but I prefer they are dealt with some level of craft. SJW are just not good story tellers for whatever reason.

        2. I enjoyed TFA, when I first saw it, even with the throw back parallels to the original series. Since I read the book first (something they wouldn’t let you do with TLJ), I didn’t even see Rey as a Mary Sue. Overall, it seemed a competent movie worth the price while munching on popcorn.

          It was later that I realized that TFA destroyed the Star Wars canon of other books. This is crazy to me, because Marvel uses their canon as the basis for their movies. TFA uses canon. Why destroy everything else (you paid for it!), in just the first movie? They threw out the entire New Republic, blew it up in seconds; thus making the original series a pointless endeavor. TFA banishes Luke, murders Han, and replaces Leia with a younger model, who can figure out on her own how to use the force.

          And then this: I don’t mind when a movie has themes that run counter to my beliefs but I prefer they are dealt with some level of craft. The themes may run counter, but the result in the story is that the Nazis win. Its like Neville Chamberlain being held up as the greatest example of how to deal with evil. If only Churchill hadn’t demanded a plan and taken over; spies may have killed Hitler while leaving Goebbels and Goring in charge. But at least they had vistas!

    3. Entertainment media has been moving this way for a while and I think it has less to do with Trump than with Obama style politics that demand everything conform to cultural marxist ideology. Regardless of who succeeded Obama, the media would still be doing what they are doing now because it isn’t driven by Trump but by their own ideological/religious beliefs.

      Many of these projects are flops but they have long lives on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and cable poisoning people’s minds.

  9. STD was billed as making the Klingons racist Trump people but in the show, race isn’t important to the Klingons. It is their culture that is important. The Klingons didn’t want the Federation to come in and boss them around. A few short years ago, this would have been a very liberal position because the Federation would be viewed as American imperialism.

    The spore drive was stupid but they used it as the vehicle for the homosexual love story. They could have worked it through some other plot. They handled the romance OK.

    The actors were all competent and it looks like people who were not impressed had those views because of the story telling. Spock suddenly has a sister, magic spore drives, Klingons without hair ect.

  10. Yeah, Deep Space 9 had it’s share of problems, but was still the best of the Star Treks after the original. I watched the pilot episode of DST and that was enough for me. What a dumpster fire!

    You know what would make a great basis for a new space-opera SF TV show? Clarke’s old 1946 short story, “Rescue Party”.

    You could even run the pilot episode just using that short story, with following episodes expanding upon the last sentence of the story. I always wanted to know what happened after that story ended.

  11. There is a lot of discovery back story not even mentioned here. The lawsuit over stealing the whole premise of the show. The man in charge and his personal failures and people that were put in charge that basically wanted to end it.. lot of drama ..

    “Understanding the Star Trek: Discovery Plagiarism Allegations”
    https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2018/09/11/understanding-the-star-trek-discovery-plagiarism-allegations/

    some of the backstory on how EP/showrunners were changed over direction of the series

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery

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