Star Trek: Discovery

[TehPW]

Doomcock is not amused in this one...

[Mazinger]

Before I saw the actual video preview, I thought Doomcock was a funny reference to Commander Saru!

10 minutes ago, TehPW said:

Doomcock is not amused in this one...

 

Edited January 24, 2019 by Mazinger

[Seto Kaiba]

45 minutes ago, TehPW said:

Doomcock is not amused in this one...

Doomcock looks suspiciously like those "automated personnel units" from Star Trek: Voyager.

[Seto Kaiba]

So... after last night's episode we're approximately halfway into Star Trek: Discovery season two.

I'm surprised to say I'm actually quite enjoying this season, though it still has some pretty glaring issues.

 

The Good

Honestly, starting around the fourth episode of the "Short Treks", it feels like the writers finally realized they're writing Star Trek... not Battlestar Galactica.  Unlike his earlier, badly out-of-character appearance as a stone-cold killer Harry Mudd in "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad", "The Escape Artist" brought back the mostly-harmless, slightly manic con man we know and love from Star Trek.  Rainn Wilson brought some really terrific comedic energy to that short episode, though its best line was stolen by Harry Judge as the Tellarite bounty hunter Tevrin Krit, who injects so much incredulity into the charge of "penetrating a space whale" that it becomes Inherently Funny Words.  

"Brother" is a bit weak, but Anson Mount's Captain Christopher Pike is pretty much exactly what this series needed.  When Tilly accidentally projects his service record onto the bridge viewscreen and he launches into his mission statement, that is the moment that Discovery finally became Star Trek for me.  Almost everything Pike does for the next several episodes comes across as a refutation, and occasionally an only thinly veiled criticism, of Discovery's first season.  He even takes a shot or two at the set design and the uniforms.  Commander Jett Reno is a classic snarky Starfleet engineer in a way that's actually funny, rather than the terribly forced crap that the writers were putting in Stamets' mouth in the first season.  She's honestly like someone spliced Scotty and Dr. McCoy together in the transporter, and it's GLORIOUS.  (Quite honestly if Stamets wasn't spoken for, I'd be shipping him with Reno for Maximum Snark.)  "New Eden" was a lovingly updated take on that old TOS chestnut, the "inexplicable human planet" that manages to get some very Roddenberry-esque moments talking about the compatibility (and/or lack thereof) of science and religious belief.  They even manage to finish on a "pet the dog" moment with bailing out the one guy who actually knew the away team wasn't a bunch of locals.  "Point of Light" fixed the Klingon aesthetics from Discovery almost completely.  The reduction in the amount of prosthetics and the addition of the hair really makes them look like an aesthetic update of the Klingons we know and love rather than some new alien race substituted for the Klingons.  We get to see a classic D7-class battlecruiser and some really excellent Klingon culture moments as we watch L'Rell try to hold onto power as the head of the High Council in the face of Kol-sha's constant antagonism.  It's every bit as good as some of the DS9 Klingon episodes.  We finally get to see the return of that classic Starfleet highly-principled altruism in "Saints of Imperfection".  Yesterday's "The Sounds of Thunder" did a LOT to make Saru's people less of a terribly stupid concept.  If I had to share a planet with something as freaky-looking as the Ba'ul, I'd probably find an ability to sense if that thing was plotting to make a snack of me rather comforting to have.

There is one really good long funny sequence where the universal translator starts breaking down all over Discovery, leading to the crew panicking as their displays and speech are all rendered in dozens of different languages while a crazy-prepared Saru goes around fixing everything.

 

The Bad

Tilly.  Just... Tilly.  She was The Wesley in season one and time has not sweetened it.  Season two is trying SO HARD to ram her down the audience's throat that any time she shows up has started to feel like the old Wesley episodes of TNG where the highly trained crew of Starfleet's elite was constantly deferring to the Marty Stu author self-insert wunderkind.  She trashes the entire shuttlebay trying to recover a piece of an asteroid and nobody bats an eye.  She almost gets herself killed trying to take a sample from said asteroid and she's only given a gentle reprimand.  She starts hallucinating a character named May who is every bit as annoying as she is, and spends two entire episodes freaking out about it, apparently in blissful ignorance of the fact that seeing people nobody else can (especially dead ones) is a bad thing.  She even accidentally chews out Captain Pike and nobody bats an eye.  Then we find out her not-so-imaginary friend is an extradimensional fungus blob monster that looks like a bad 90's CG effect (c. Voyager "Macrocosm") that abducts her into the mycelial network (thought we were done with that BS, TBH) where she rescues the ghost of Dr. Culver.  Whether she grows out of this overeager "genius" nonsense to become an actually-likeable character like Dr. Bashir or just becomes a permanent nuisance like Wesley Crusher remains to be seen... but my money is on the latter.

Pike seems to have a little bit of Adama-itis.  He puts up with a shocking amount of disrespect from Burnham, Tilly, and even more surprisingly, Saru.  He does it with enormous grace and a good sensor of humor, but it's still a little off-putting.  He also will seemingly agree to almost anything if he's asked at least twice... including more or less declaring war against the other race on Saru's homeworld on nothing but Saru's word and some questionable and incomplete intelligence from Burnham and Tilly.  

Saru's "I'm dying" plot was... well... an almost comically overacted B-plot to an otherwise passable episode.  After spending an entire season establishing that he neither likes nor trusts Burnham after the whole Shenzhou thing, having him suddenly decide that she's the closest thing he has to family was just bizarre.  Doug Jones spent the entire episode playing to the back row, and oh boy does it show.  The big reveal of the next episode is just an arse pull... 

Spoiler

... that the panicky, perpetually fearful Kelpians used to be the predator species on their home planet despite apparently being herbivorous is just beyond silly.  The way that it was presented didn't help one bit either.  Saru becomes an "evolved" Kelpian in the previous episode and suddenly has poison dart shooters where his threat ganglia used to be, and is instantly raging against his homeworld's culture as built on a lie.  Nobody seems to seriously think this might, y'know, compromise his judgement when their next port of call is Saru's own homeworld.  

Saru decides to FORCE every Kelpian on the planet to "evolve" the way he did, and nobody bats an eye despite having literally JUST seen historical records showing that those same "evolved" Kelpians had nearly driven the Ba'ul to extinction in the not-too-distant past.  The USS Discovery literally helps him do it.  Whatever happened to the Prime Directive?  Y'know, that General Order 1 thing that Pike and Georgeau were banging on about?  Those terrifying predators Saru was always going on about?  Turns out they were ecological conservationists who were nearly wiped out by the Kelpians and yet elected to establish a symbiotic balance with them to ensure that both species could keep living in peace instead of wiping the Kelpians out with their superior technology.  Somehow, this is depicted as A Bad Thing purely because Saru is angry about it.

Lastly, the few attempts at physical comedy like Lt. Linus sneezing on Pike's science officer, fall really flat.  They all seem to revolve around having a cold, and it's just bizarre to say the Universal Translator is still having trouble with Saurian even though first contact with the Saurians occurred almost exactly a century earlier and the Saurians had been UFP members for like eighty years.

 

The Ugly

SECTION 31.  Holy sh*t was this a bad idea.

For a covert agency, they're really incredibly bad at the "covert" part in Discovery.  Section 31 was so deep undercover that the best intelligence agencies in the quadrant didn't even know they existed in Deep Space Nine, and the same was true in Enterprise.  In Discovery, Section 31 is operating out in the open.  They have their own uniforms and black Starfleet badges, and wear them openly.  They assign a liaison officer to Discovery who makes ZERO effort to conceal that he's a Section 31 operative... which is doubly odd for a man who is supposed to be dead.  They're trying really hard to push the Georgeau series concept too, so she naturally has to make multiple appearances as that old racist catty evil asian woman cliche while bantering with Burnham.

[Mazinger]

So while I've been following along with Season 2 and hadn't yet watched all the short treks, but I did so last night and really liked them.

Which was interesting as immediately after I watched the Macross 7 Plus shorts.  Again Macross 7 did it first!

Anyways I really liked those shorts and the season has been shaping up well.  It seems like we have a bonafide Trek tv series now, where as that certainly felt iffy in season 1.

I just want to call out the characters who are really standing out for me this season: Silvia Tilly and the engineer they picked up in the first ep, Jett Reno.

Any scenes with them just really shine through.

Of course, the rest of the cast is good, too.

[Seto Kaiba]

30 minutes ago, Mazinger said:

Which was interesting as immediately after I watched the Macross 7 Plus shorts.  Again Macross 7 did it first!

Macross 7 Plus was an extra feature on the home video (VHS/LD/DVD) release after the series ended... that's a bit different from the Short Treks coming out between seasons.

 

35 minutes ago, Mazinger said:

Anyways I really liked those shorts and the season has been shaping up well.  It seems like we have a bonafide Trek tv series now, where as that certainly felt iffy in season 1.

I definitely agree that Star Trek: Discovery's second season is finally starting to feel like a proper bloody Star Trek title.

 

[Dynaman]

My wife bought the first season on Youtube(*) and we have been watching it intermittently for a couple months.  While not as blasphemous as others here make it out to be it is also not much watch TV either - hence the intermittent watching.   

 

(*) - NOT going to sign up for another streaming service but buying a particular title is another matter.

[pengbuzz]

On 2/22/2019 at 10:42 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

The Ugly

SECTION 31.  Holy sh*t was this a bad idea.

For a covert agency, they're really incredibly bad at the "covert" part in Discovery.  Section 31 was so deep undercover that the best intelligence agencies in the quadrant didn't even know they existed in Deep Space Nine, and the same was true in Enterprise.  In Discovery, Section 31 is operating out in the open.  They have their own uniforms and black Starfleet badges, and wear them openly.  They assign a liaison officer to Discovery who makes ZERO effort to conceal that he's a Section 31 operative... which is doubly odd for a man who is supposed to be dead.  They're trying really hard to push the Georgeau series concept too, so she naturally has to make multiple appearances as that old racist catty evil asian woman cliche while bantering with Burnham.

To be fair: maybe this is the reason they are so covert by the TNG era. They got lax after Enterprise and had to re-establish their "Secret Squirrel" status! lol

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

To be fair: maybe this is the reason they are so covert by the TNG era. They got lax after Enterprise and had to re-establish their "Secret Squirrel" status! lol

Once the cat's out of the bag, good luck getting it back in...

Section 31 parading its agents around like it's a legitimate branch of Starfleet Intelligence runs completely counter to how they've been depicted in every previous appearance (canon and pseudocanon) as a secret, unsanctioned spy organization that had been operating autonomously without oversight since its inception.  They were the Federation's best-kept secret, so much so that even the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar had no idea they existed... and the Tal Shiar had been infiltrated by 31 at the very highest levels.

But come Discovery, they're Starfleet's worst kept secret.  They're standing around in plain sight all over the Discovery.  Even the interns in the engine room know they're a thing.  This can't be a recent development either, since Pike and Number One know a good deal more than Discovery's crew (to the point of being on a first-name basis with senior operatives) and they've been out screwing around on the frontiers of explored space for the last five years.  The Klingon head of state is at least dimly aware of their existence.  How do so many thousands of people get selective amnesia all at once that NO record is left of them by the time they abducted Bashir?

 

 

... also, whatever happened to the new captain that the USS Discovery was supposed to take on at Vulcan?

Are they just sort of... stuck there... since Christopher Pike jacked their new command like he was picking up a rental car while his regular ride was in the shop?

Edited February 28, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[tekering]

I can't believe you guys are still bending over backwards trying to fit Discovery into established Star Trek continuity.  Just because it's made some minor cosmetic alterations in its second season doesn't solve the inherent inconsistencies in the premise.  "Spore drive" technology has never existed in the franchise before, either in the past or -- more importantly -- in the future.  The series is still full of never-before-seen alien species, and the few we do know still look substantially different than previous depictions.  And the main character is still Spock's adopted human sister, which I can't even.  

Thus, I still maintain this whole series is an alternate universe, and recommend you regard it as such.  The sooner you embrace that, the easier it will be to enjoy it on its own terms.

 

[Mazinger]

3 hours ago, tekering said:

...The series is still full of never-before-seen alien species, and the few we do know still look substantially different than previous depictions.  And the main character is still Spock's adopted human sister, which I can't even.  

Thus, I still maintain this whole series is an alternate universe, and recommend you regard it as such.  The sooner you embrace that, the easier it will be to enjoy it on its own terms.  

That probably wasn't referencing me, but I'll bite regardless. I suspect that the producers decided to do a reset and make subsequent seasons hew closer to the older shows to keep the fan base happy.

And I think that part of the fun will be if they keep introducing new things, but then go to lengths, successfully, to show why those things were never brought up in the older shows.  I'm not sure how it will all wrap up 2 or 3 seasons from now, but if they manage to pull off something really cool to show us why Michael never existed in the older shows, then they'll have earned my respect.

Being a fan of Macross I've learned to be a little flexible on canonicity.

While it may not be TNG Part Deaux, some of that hip new hawtness of Discovery had been refreshing.

Edited February 28, 2019 by Mazinger

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Mazinger said:

That probably wasn't referencing me, but I'll bite regardless.

Yeah, I'm probably the one that was directed at...

 

7 hours ago, tekering said:

I can't believe you guys are still bending over backwards trying to fit Discovery into established Star Trek continuity.

Don't blame us... blame CBS and the showrunners, who continue to insist that Star Trek: Discovery is a prime continuity series belonging to the same timeline as TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and the first ten Star Trek movies.  They're adamant that Discovery is not a parallel universe story and is not part of the so-called "Kelvin timeline" created for those appalling J.J. Abrams reboot movies.

Much of it can be made to fit or at least explained away with minimal hand-waving.  Some things, though, are glaring enough to induce real headaches.

 

Quote

Just because it's made some minor cosmetic alterations in its second season doesn't solve the inherent inconsistencies in the premise.  "Spore drive" technology has never existed in the franchise before, either in the past or -- more importantly -- in the future.  

They've tabled a couple reasons that Starfleet decommissioned and abandoned the Spore Drive technology already, most of which came before season one ended:

• Even when it's working properly, there's a nonzero chance that undetectable stellar phenomena will cause it to kill the entire crew by twisting them into fleshy rotini and wreck the entire ship.  (This happened to the USS Glenn.)
• The drive system doesn't work without a very specific type of living navigator, and can be near-fatally injurious to said navigator.
  • The Glenn only caught the one tardigrade by accident, and research showed it was intelligent and possibly sentient... in short, using them would be animal cruelty or slavery.
  • Using a humanoid volunteer requires cybernetic implants and illegal genetic modification.  Not to mention it's extremely painful and taxing, and overuse can put the navigator into a catatonic state.
• Malfunction or unintended operation can result in arriving at the right coordinates in the wrong universe entirely... or getting your consciousness trapped in the network.
• Abuse of the technology can cause damage to the subspace domain the spores exist in, with potentially fatal results for all life in the multiverse.
• The spores themselves are also apparently dangerous, requiring the engineering crew working on and around the drive be vaccinated against them at regular intervals.
• Other lifeforms living in the spore domain are fundamentally deadly to humanoid life and could potentially destroy a starship.

Stamets and the Discovery's engineering crew were getting started with the removal and disassembly of the spore drive at the start of season two when Pike came aboard.  At some point after the red angel nonsense settles down they'll probably finish removing the damn thing and it'll be carted off to whatever laboratory Starfleet was planning to send Stamets to.  

 

It wouldn't exactly be the first time Starfleet toyed with a new propulsion technology before discarding it and never mentioning it again... Excelsior's "great experiment" transwarp drive, soliton wave riding, Voyager's variable geometry warp drive, displacement wave, experimental Warp 10 drive, coaxial warp drive, graviton catapulting, quantum slipstream, spatial vortices, etc.

 

 

Quote

The series is still full of never-before-seen alien species, and the few we do know still look substantially different than previous depictions.  

To be entirely fair, Star Trek has been pulling "remember the new guy?" on a species-wide level since at least TNG Season One.  

Anytime the plot of TNG called for the Enterprise to run into an alien race powerful enough to tangibly threaten Starfleet but wasn't starfish aliens or some other incomprehensible space entity it was always a race who they totally had a ton of history with but who had otherwise not been worth mentioning up to that point like the Talarians, the Cardassians, the Sheliak, Tamarians, etc.

As far as the never-before-seen alien species, the galaxy is a big place.  The Federation itself had over a hundred member worlds, and there are tons of nonaligned worlds filling in the gaps.  It's not surprising we're seeing species we've never seen before, when the previous shows (TOS, TNG, VOY) spent all their time out on the very frontiers of explored space and in the time of ENT those worlds were well beyond the frontiers of explored space at the time.  In the ~100 years separating those three generations of exploration, the frontier moved out pretty far... so these species we're seeing for the first time may simply have been lost in the gaps as their regions of space went from "frontier" to "cosmopolitan" or at least were left alone by their own request.  The Ba'ul are isolationists, the Kelpians and the species from the pilot don't have warp technology yet, etc.

For redesigning existing alien species... it's not like this is the first time that's happened to any of them.  

This is what, the third time the Klingons have been redesigned?  The Tellarites have had it twice, and so have the Andorians.  The Saurians got a soft redesign, but it isn't actually all that different from the Saurians we've seen previously... just designed for facial motility.  I loathed the Klingon redesign from season one, but they did make some good strides to harmonize it with previous Klingon aesthetics in season two (who'd have thought hair would make such a difference?).  

 

Quote

And the main character is still Spock's adopted human sister, which I can't even.  

That is a little bit BS, yeah... mostly since it was an incredibly obvious attempt to make an otherwise-unlikeable character appeal to the Trekkie audience.

Edited February 28, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Mazinger said:

And I think that part of the fun will be if they keep introducing new things, but then go to lengths, successfully, to show why those things were never brought up in the older shows.  I'm not sure how it will all wrap up 2 or 3 seasons from now, but if they manage to pull off something really cool to show us why Michael never existed in the older shows, then they'll have earned my respect.

Do we really need a new/additional explanation for it, though?

Being incredibly averse to talking about family has been a part of Spock's character since "Journey to Babel" in TOS's second season.  Kirk only found out that Sarek and Amanda were Spock's parents when he unwittingly cornered Spock on the issue by offering him a few hours of planet leave to visit his family while his parents were standing in the transporter room with them.  Spock only admitted that Sybok was a family member when Kirk was on a tear in his own brig demanding to know why Spock hadn't shot the man trying to take over their ship.  Is it really surprising that he wouldn't have mentioned the orphaned human girl his parents fostered without someone nailing him to the wall on it first?  She wasn't even really a relative, they didn't get along, there's some as-of-yet unspecified bad blood between them, and to put the cherry on it she's also known as the idiot who assaulted her captain, tried to launch an unprovoked attack on the Klingons, and is credited with starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands, nearly crippled Starfleet, and almost ended in genocide twice.  You wouldn't want to talk about having a family member like that either if you had one... just acknowledging it could be a career-killer without a suitably understanding CO.

(Spock's TOS-era remarks about there being "absolutely no record" of a mutiny on a Starfleet ship becomes a case of exact words in highsight... since Burnham's record was expunged by the Federation president, the record of her attempted mutiny no longer exists.)

Sarek keeping mum on her existence isn't surprising either given that he was as tight-lipped as Spock and sees his Sophie's Choice situation over the Science Academy as a shameful memory he refuses to discuss with anyone... and both TAS and DSC both imply other Vulcans see him as a bit strange for his interest in humans, which would also likely make him a little disinclined to talk about her.

Burnham herself is unlikely to end up a high-flier.  She may have been pardoned by the President, but nobody's in a hurry to forget she was Starfleet's first mutineer and attempted to start a shooting war with the Klingons.  Even after being reinstated she got sidelined to science officer under someone who used to be her subordinate.  She's just another one of the tens of thousands of Starfleet officers who are exemplary enough to climb the ranks to a senior position but not exemplary enough to leave a profound mark on the service the way Archer, April, Pike, Kirk, Picard, Riker, etc. did.

[Dynaman]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

She wasn't even really a relative, they didn't get along, there's some as-of-yet unspecified bad blood between them, and to put the cherry on it she's also known as the idiot who assaulted her captain, tried to launch an unprovoked attack on the Klingons, and is credited with starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands, nearly crippled Starfleet, and almost ended in genocide twice.

Well, that is the kind of thing that people would tend to know who that character was and who they are related to - even if not by blood.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Well, that is the kind of thing that people would tend to know who that character was and who they are related to - even if not by blood.

How much does the general public actually know about Sarek's family circumstances though?

Either Jim Kirk failed one hell of a spot check, or Spock was somehow able to conceal the details of his parentage from his Starfleet file.  Pike seems to be more clued in, but then he's just spent five years in deep space with Spock and is still picking most of it up from Burnham and Spock's parents as a result of Spock going bananas and subsequently AWOL.

Maybe Burnham fell off Starfleet's collective radar by Kirk's time, having been reassigned to Space Siberia the way Scotty was in the Abrams movies.

 

Totally unrelated, but did anyone else notice Pike's stand-in science officer looks and acts a lot like Arnold Rimmer?

[Sandman]

Maybe he’ll return as a hologram.

[pengbuzz]

On 2/27/2019 at 9:53 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Once the cat's out of the bag, good luck getting it back in...

Section 31 parading its agents around like it's a legitimate branch of Starfleet Intelligence runs completely counter to how they've been depicted in every previous appearance (canon and pseudocanon) as a secret, unsanctioned spy organization that had been operating autonomously without oversight since its inception.  They were the Federation's best-kept secret, so much so that even the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar had no idea they existed... and the Tal Shiar had been infiltrated by 31 at the very highest levels.

But come Discovery, they're Starfleet's worst kept secret.  They're standing around in plain sight all over the Discovery.  Even the interns in the engine room know they're a thing.  This can't be a recent development either, since Pike and Number One know a good deal more than Discovery's crew (to the point of being on a first-name basis with senior operatives) and they've been out screwing around on the frontiers of explored space for the last five years.  The Klingon head of state is at least dimly aware of their existence.  How do so many thousands of people get selective amnesia all at once that NO record is left of them by the time they abducted Bashir?

 

 

Actually, rather simple: submerge. People stop talking and forget once you stop showing up for some time. Then you pass into legend, legend becomes myth, and myth fades into obscurity.

[pengbuzz]

19 hours ago, tekering said:

I can't believe you guys are still bending over backwards trying to fit Discovery into established Star Trek continuity.  Just because it's made some minor cosmetic alterations in its second season doesn't solve the inherent inconsistencies in the premise.  "Spore drive" technology has never existed in the franchise before, either in the past or -- more importantly -- in the future.  The series is still full of never-before-seen alien species, and the few we do know still look substantially different than previous depictions.  And the main character is still Spock's adopted human sister, which I can't even.  

Thus, I still maintain this whole series is an alternate universe, and recommend you regard it as such.  The sooner you embrace that, the easier it will be to enjoy it on its own terms.

 

I'm going to go with  Seto Kaiba on this:

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Don't blame us... blame CBS and the showrunners, who continue to insist that Star Trek: Discovery is a prime continuity series belonging to the same timeline as TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and the first ten Star Trek movies.  They're adamant that Discovery is not a parallel universe story and is not part of the so-called "Kelvin timeline" created for those appalling J.J. Abrams reboot movies.

Much of it can be made to fit or at least explained away with minimal hand-waving.  Some things, though, are glaring enough to induce real headaches.

I mean honestly: if Trek is big enough for multiple imaginations, then its' also big enough for multiple timelines/ universes. Trying to shoehorn Discovery into the Prime Timeline is just absurd (even in the face of my previous suggestion about Section 31).

Debate is fun when done right; tempers and egos do not have to rule it.

 

Edited March 1, 2019 by pengbuzz

[Dynaman]

> How much does the general public actually know about Sarek's family circumstances though?

Ensign nobody know who Micheal was and news being news, the Vulcan ambassador being the adoptive father of a traitor WOULD be mentioned and known.

I also tend to just think of it as an alternate timeline but don't really care either way.  

Edited March 1, 2019 by Dynaman

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Actually, rather simple: submerge. People stop talking and forget once you stop showing up for some time. Then you pass into legend, legend becomes myth, and myth fades into obscurity.

People talking isn't the problem... it's the impersonal records maintained by the Federation and its rival powers.  Intelligence organizations have very long memories and obsessively write EVERYTHING down.  Submerging won't make those records go away.  Particularly not ones held by hostile foreign powers like the Cardassian Union, Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, etc.

Koval's dismissal of Section 31 as a fiction created by Luther Sloan to justify a rogue intelligence operation to take revenge for Vice Admiral Fujisaki's supposed assassination would not stand up under examination if the Romulans had any kind of records indicating Section 31 was a real organization barely a century ago.  The Cardassian Obsidian Order, which was generally acknowledged to be the finest covert intelligence organization in the quadrant, had no idea Section 31 existed at all.  The Founders, who had infiltrated Starfleet at its highest levels, were also completely clueless as to Section 31's existence even though the agency almost succeeded in wiping them out.

 

12 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I mean honestly: if Trek is big enough for multiple imaginations, then its' also big enough for multiple timelines/ universes. Trying to shoehorn Discovery into the Prime Timeline is just absurd (even in the face of my previous suggestion about Section 31).

Oh, absolutely... and they practically wrote themselves a blank check to do it back in Enterprise with the Temporal Cold War.

Sadly, the only title to ever actually take advantage of it was the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series, which mainly used it to take potshots at the various terrible ideas that had been unsuccessfully pitched for new Star Trek shows by referencing them as "bad future" timelines created by Future Guy that were retroactively prevented by the temporal agents of the Federation Temporal Agency (31st century) and/or Temporal Integrity Commission (28th century).

 

9 hours ago, Dynaman said:

> How much does the general public actually know about Sarek's family circumstances though?

Ensign nobody know who Micheal was and news being news, the Vulcan ambassador being the adoptive father of a traitor WOULD be mentioned and known.

I also tend to just think of it as an alternate timeline but don't really care either way.  

I was going to argue that there was no reason Burnham would list Sarek as her father on her papers when Sarek doesn't acknowledge her as his daughter publicly... but last night's episode torpedoed my argument.

Burnham's status as Sarek's ward/foster daughter is apparently well-enough known that she's able to use it to get permission to land her shuttle directly at the ambassadorial residence from Vulcan's air traffic control.

[Dynaman]

To poke holes in TOS.  How the HECK would Kirk not know that Sarek is Spock's father?  Every captain in every fleet ever finds out EVERYTHING in the files about his first officer and Spock's dad being an Ambassador would be front and center.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

To poke holes in TOS.  How the HECK would Kirk not know that Sarek is Spock's father?  Every captain in every fleet ever finds out EVERYTHING in the files about his first officer and Spock's dad being an Ambassador would be front and center.

Obviously, they refrained in Spock's case to ensure no one played favorites with the politically-connected half-vulcan.

[Dynaman]

48 minutes ago, JB0 said:

Obviously, they refrained in Spock's case to ensure no one played favorites with the politically-connected half-vulcan.

They would put in BOLD letters to let his next captain know what kind of political hot potato he could be getting.  That and his family being high enough up that lady high mucky muck was at his Pon Far ritual...

[pengbuzz]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

People talking isn't the problem... it's the impersonal records maintained by the Federation and its rival powers.  Intelligence organizations have very long memories and obsessively write EVERYTHING down.  Submerging won't make those records go away.  Particularly not ones held by hostile foreign powers like the Cardassian Union, Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, etc.

Koval's dismissal of Section 31 as a fiction created by Luther Sloan to justify a rogue intelligence operation to take revenge for Vice Admiral Fujisaki's supposed assassination would not stand up under examination if the Romulans had any kind of records indicating Section 31 was a real organization barely a century ago.  The Cardassian Obsidian Order, which was generally acknowledged to be the finest covert intelligence organization in the quadrant, had no idea Section 31 existed at all.  The Founders, who had infiltrated Starfleet at its highest levels, were also completely clueless as to Section 31's existence even though the agency almost succeeded in wiping them out.

You have a good point here; those records would be pretty damning, not to mention long-lasting. So then by necessity, this would have to be a universe where Section 31's existence were not a well-kept secret.

Quote

Oh, absolutely... and they practically wrote themselves a blank check to do it back in Enterprise with the Temporal Cold War.

Sadly, the only title to ever actually take advantage of it was the Department of Temporal Investigation novel series, which mainly used it to take potshots at the various terrible ideas that had been unsuccessfully pitched for new Star Trek shows by referencing them as "bad future" timelines created by Future Guy that were retroactively prevented by the temporal agents of the Federation Temporal Agency (31st century) and/or Temporal Integrity Commission (28th century).

That would actually make a pretty good anthology series on TV I would think. And it would allow for actors to be replaced fairly easily as well as one-time and recurring roles by others.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

They would put in BOLD letters to let his next captain know what kind of political hot potato he could be getting.  That and his family being high enough up that lady high mucky muck was at his Pon Far ritual...

Ah, but you're not considering it in the light of privacy laws passed after the Eugenics Wars shattered most of the nations of Earth, World War Three nuked the rest, and the Bell riots exposed systematic oppression and segregation of the poor in the United States... which managed to survive both wars unscathed?

 

Basically, Star Trek is an inconsistent mess on the best of days, and the titular TV series especially was rarely concerned with continuity that lasted more than an hour. Just gotta roll with the punches.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 hours ago, Dynaman said:

To poke holes in TOS.  How the HECK would Kirk not know that Sarek is Spock's father?  Every captain in every fleet ever finds out EVERYTHING in the files about his first officer and Spock's dad being an Ambassador would be front and center.

17 hours ago, JB0 said:

Obviously, they refrained in Spock's case to ensure no one played favorites with the politically-connected half-vulcan.

15 hours ago, JB0 said:

Ah, but you're not considering it in the light of privacy laws passed after the Eugenics Wars shattered most of the nations of Earth, World War Three nuked the rest, and the Bell riots exposed systematic oppression and segregation of the poor in the United States... which managed to survive both wars unscathed?

Spock could have lied on his Starfleet application to avoid being given special treatment because of his father's status as one of the Federation's most accomplished diplomats.  He wouldn't be the only character in Star Trek to have lied to get into Starfleet... Simon Tarses in Star Trek: the Next Generation lied about his ancestry to get into Starfleet because he was part-Romulan, and Dr. Julian Bashir in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine applied under an assumed name (his real given name is Jules, not Julian) and he lied about his genetic status on the application.  (Spock also operated under a false identity when he used the Guardian of Forever in TAS to resolve a time paradox involving his younger self's untimely death.)

Maybe Starfleet background checks are just on the honor system until you screw up badly enough, or maybe they have a section where you can opt out of identifying your family like you can opt out of stating your race on job applications today.

 

 

17 hours ago, Dynaman said:

They would put in BOLD letters to let his next captain know what kind of political hot potato he could be getting.  That and his family being high enough up that lady high mucky muck was at his Pon Far ritual...

IF they knew.

As far as the high priestess who presided over that ritual, even over a century later (in Voyager) Vulcans are noted to be extremely taciturn and prudish about anything involving Pon Farr, so Kirk and co. may not have known that was anything unusual.

 

 

15 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

You have a good point here; those records would be pretty damning, not to mention long-lasting. So then by necessity, this would have to be a universe where Section 31's existence were not a well-kept secret.

Yeah, the chancellor of the Klingon High Council knows... and she's from House Mo'kai, who have intelligence-gathering and covert operations as their hat.

Either that or they're going to dig even deeper into the relaunch novels for material and this incarnation of Section 31 will end up being destroyed to cover up the organization's existence the same way the one from Archer's era was.  (Discovery has made at least a few references to Control, the AI from the novels that founded and oversees Section 31, destroying it whenever it gets exposed and refounding it when it's needed again.)

 

15 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

That would actually make a pretty good anthology series on TV I would think. And it would allow for actors to be replaced fairly easily as well as one-time and recurring roles by others.

Isn't that more or less what Discovery was supposd to have been initially?

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Isn't that more or less what Discovery was supposd to have been initially?

That's the problem; initially.  I wish they would have ran with it fully, as it would have allowed for a lot more, IMO.

[Dynaman]

> 

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Spock could have lied on his Starfleet application to avoid being given special treatment because of his father's status as one of the Federation's most accomplished diplomats.

Come on now, you know that is not the reason it was not initially mentioned in the show...

[azrael]

IIRC, Spock and Sarek always had a strained relationship. from childhood into adulthood. We know Sarek never approved of Spock joining Starfleet and it took Sarek the better part of 40 years to admit he was wrong.They also publicly disagreed with how to deal with the Cardassians when Spock became a diplomat.

Spock could have always said his dad was "a member of the diplomatic corps" when asked by rank&file. Of course his commanding officers would know but Spock could always say "Can we talk about something else" or changed the subject if the topic came up. A lot of kids of famous people don't mention their familial ties to avoid unwanted attention. Spock could have been no different.

[Dynaman]

I'll stick with lazy writing.  It would not even of had much difference in dialog the first time Sarek is on screen.  Instead of Kirk being surprised that Spock's father is Sarek he could just as easily be surprised that Sarek and Spock have a strained relationship and that is something that would not be in the personnel file.

Not to mention that Spock's brother is an outcast nut, by Vulcan standards, and his adoptive sister is a murderess, warmongering traitor (by all of Starfleet though that could change before TOS takes place)

In a way the Spock clan is like the Skywalker family in Star Wars - everything has to revolve around one of their family in one way or another.

Edited March 3, 2019 by Dynaman

[Seto Kaiba]

22 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

That's the problem; initially.  I wish they would have ran with it fully, as it would have allowed for a lot more, IMO.

It would've been a lot better than what season one turned out to be.

 

21 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Come on now, you know that is not the reason it was not initially mentioned in the show...

Well, duh... but we're looking at in-universe, in-continuity explanations here.  Unless, of course, the Red Angel turns out to be Gene f*cking Roddenberry come to straighten out CBS's sh*t.

(There are a couple similarly weird moments, the most glaring of which being the end of the Temporal Cold War where Daniels implies the events of last couple seasons just un-happened when the timeline reset...)

 

19 hours ago, Dynaman said:

I'll stick with lazy writing.  It would not even of had much difference in dialog the first time Sarek is on screen.  Instead of Kirk being surprised that Spock's father is Sarek he could just as easily be surprised that Sarek and Spock have a strained relationship and that is something that would not be in the personnel file.

That's not as dramatic or funny/awkward, though... 

 

19 hours ago, Dynaman said:

Not to mention that Spock's brother is an outcast nut, by Vulcan standards, and his adoptive sister is a murderess, warmongering traitor (by all of Starfleet though that could change before TOS takes place)

Sybok's arguably worse than an outcast nut... being somewhere between a religious heretic and a counterculture hippie cult leader, he's basically a Vulcan Charles Manson.

Burnham... well... what I question is why the entire Federation apparently blames her for starting the Klingon War.  It's realy weird when you think about it, given that she didn't actually DO anything to provoke the Klingons into shooting (Georgeau prevented her from firing first) and the Klingons were quite open about having always intended to start a war.  The only thing she did that had a measurable impact on the war was she shot T'Kuvma after the war had already started.  All she's really guilty of is assaulting her superior officer, attempted mutiny, and attempting to commit an unprovoked act of war.  It's like she irrationally blamed herself for the war out of survivor's guilt and the court martial just rolled with it in defiance of the evidence to the contrary.  

 

19 hours ago, Dynaman said:

In a way the Spock clan is like the Skywalker family in Star Wars - everything has to revolve around one of their family in one way or another.

If we were looking only at Discovery and TOS, maybe... and maybe the Enterprise relaunch, since Sarek's parents figure relatively prominently in some of those books.

It's not like Spock and his family dominate the story of 99% of the canon, after all.

[Dynaman]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, duh... but we're looking at in-universe, in-continuity explanations here.  Unless, of course, the Red Angel turns out to be Gene f*cking Roddenberry come to straighten out CBS's sh*t.

There is a great bit from Benny Hill where Benny is playing a director of a low budget film that a film critic is gushing over and every time the critic brings up something "extraordinary" from the film Benny would say that it was really something having to do with the cheapness of the film production.  I like to stick with Benny's realistic side of the story.  Or as Opus the Penguin's theory of life "Your born, you go on some diets, you die".  I'm a Doctor Who fan, I gave up caring about continuity problems decades ago.

 

> If we were looking only at Discovery and TOS, maybe...

And Next Generation where Spock is a major part of the Romulan whatever the heck was going on.  

Edited March 4, 2019 by Dynaman

[slide]

WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

May the Intrigue and Speculation Continue!

 

[UN Spacy]

Need to renew my membership...haven’t seen anything since episode 2. Heard this season has been pretty solid so far. 

[Mazinger]

tl;dr for Doomcock.  Season 3 will be only Short Treks. Well, given that the short treks are some of my favorite new official Trek anything, I say bring it on.