HD DAD posted:

I’ve said it before, but Disco excels when it’s just being Weird As Hell™, as opposed to attempting some kind of epic, melodramatic tale.

Like, when the ship half-phased into mushroom space to revive a dead guy? Give me an IV of that poo poo straight into my veins.

Pastamania posted:

Picard, like Disco, is orange-and-teal as fuuuuck.

Drone posted:

Star Trek: Discover What's Gonna Make Michael Burnham Start Crying This Time

Peachfart posted:

I will start watching it when it stops sucking. Maybe Picard will be good but I seriously doubt it.

Luigi Thirty posted:

My god, I watched it and it’s Star Trek that’s post TNG, GIVES US ROMULANS, evolves the aesthetics, and isn’t grimdark? I’ll take twelve! Excited to see where this goes.

Gonz posted:

Is this the first time we’ve actually seen the Daystrom Institute?

DaveKap posted:

I liked all the stuff that wasn't action because 1999 called and The Matrix wants to know why in the world you would ever think it was a good idea to "film" (it's pure cg) this shot from this angle (trimmed for space):
https://i.imgur.com/VsrVqeh.gifv

Hipster_Doofus posted:

So far not one person in this thread has panned this or even said "meh," not even Tighclops. This bodes well.

Also the imdb ratings for episode one dayum...

Lizard Combatant posted:

Gasp! No, really?


Yeah that's a really common trope by this point, one that we've seen in countless stories and one of the groaner moments of the show. If a 2019 Jason Bourne show is your first exposure to it though, let me be the first to welcome you to planet earth Mr Ambassador.

nine-gear crow posted:

Anyway, viewership numbers are starting to trickle in, and Picard's first episode was the most watched single broadcast in the history of CTV Sci-Fi/Space Channel in Canada. God only knows how well its doing on Amazon Prime and CBS Access if it did this well on a Canadian basic cable broadcast network.

Khanstant posted:

Are there any time travel fictions that work on the premise of time not being linear? We always have to think that if we go back in the past and change this or that, it must have consequences for the future but in our world the nature of time is still kind of mysterious and in a fictional world you're obviously free to construct time to work however you want. Go back in time, kill your dad, go back to present and you still exist both with a dad and a dead dad.

zoux posted:

Why would anyone on earth shop at a ferengi establishment

Arglebargle III posted:

It would be cool if Star Trek was about the future.

large_gourd posted:

It's just unfortunate that the message of Star Trek has become that utopia isn't possible.

AntherUslessPoster posted:

Every time travel creates a multiverse 'branch' and a new timeline that is affected by your actions in this moment.
But is somehow fixed when you undo your actions, which creates yet another timeline that should in theory be the same as yours when you fixed it but in fact not.

Rhyno posted:

Holy poo poo, 175 new posts and a third of it is about those loving glasses.

Mods, can that discussion be bannable now? For fucks sake.

DaveKap posted:

Their Star Trek cred died when Mike didn't like The Orville because "it was too much like TNG." What the gently caress? It's exactly what he wants and he won't watch it.

Rhyno posted:

There's another Trek thread for that bullshit.

This thread is about Michael Burnam, Savior if the Universe.

Cojawfee posted:

Discovery was mostly just "and they have this really cool technology that does this" without thinking anything of it. Then someone realizes "oh poo poo, that didn't exist in TOS and our show takes place right before that." The solution was always "Wow, turns out that technology really sucked rear end, and the federation never used it again." They probably decided to throw them into the future so they could finally do cool poo poo without having to constantly worry about "BUT KIRK NEVER HAD THAT!"

One Nut Wonder posted:

I would shoot waves and waves of cum if Q showed up.

Grand Fromage posted:

I've been thinking this for ages. Nobody wants a screen with the background visible like that! Good lord that would be distracting.

Delthalaz posted:

Lizard Combatant posted:

Why are there working stiffs on Mars complaining about the lovely conditions, talking like contemporary dock workers in the heart of the Federation fleet shipyards?

(I know, I know - they're building the evacuation fleet)

Stuff like that feels just a wee bit uncreative, like they have to fall back on cliche either so the audience isn't too alienated or because they don't actually see the incongruity of having these working class type characters in this setting. I kept waiting for someone to get their pay docked for not clocking in on time.

I'm not saying this makes the show bad. I'm approaching it just from the perspective of a writer that gets to imagine the future and it'd be like seeing a teacher, frustrated because their school's underfunded and class sizes keep getting bigger.

I know the old shows wisely avoided showing much of how Earth works because it's a bit of a minefield, but if you're going to do it then at least show me some far out new future society, not slapping a star trek skin on stock modern day professions.


Really? I've had that cello line stuck in my head all week.

MichiganCubbie posted:

^^I agree about Ro.^^


I really do believe the doctor scene was written for Crusher.

Regarde Aduck posted:

They did say the Zhat Vash secret was thousands of years old. Something like that. The word thousand was used.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Why are there working stiffs on Mars complaining about the lovely conditions, talking like contemporary dock workers in the heart of the Federation fleet shipyards?

(I know, I know - they're building the evacuation fleet)

Stuff like that feels just a wee bit uncreative, like they have to fall back on cliche either so the audience isn't too alienated or because they don't actually see the incongruity of having these working class type characters in this setting. I kept waiting for someone to get their pay docked for not clocking in on time.

Binary Logic posted:

The workers were either:
a. criminals working as part of their sentence
b. working in the shipyards to pay for, or as prerequisite to entering Starfleet.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Either of those could be legit interesting if they were in any way supported by the text.

nine-gear crow posted:

Neelix was obtrusive and dumb in equal measure and just all around annoying. And it was a drat shame because Ethan Phillips just exuded charisma and made you want to like him and utterly nailed the heavy stuff for his character, but then Neelix would do something stupid like tell Tuvok he read the letter from his wife before he delivered it to him without realize what was wrong about that.

Brawnfire posted:

I can't even begin to tell with all the camera lens warping going on.

HD DAD posted:

You can almost see the gnashing of their teeth through the writing.

Hot take: Disco-prise is awesome and I like it better than the original model. And the bridge set was incredible.

Lizard Combatant posted:

I'm assuming he was joking and referring to the point where the shelves meet not being 100% perfectly aligned, not the barrel distortion of the lens.

But the most important part is the joking.

kidkissinger, please tell everyone you were joking. dear god please tell them or this will never end.

e: gently caress it, forget the shelves look at that bent rear end cupboard! bullshit production design. just pure garbage.

adaz posted:

Years ago when the star trek experience thing was still at the vegas hilton I threw away an embarrassing amount of money to spend a ton of time on the recreation of the enterprise-d bridge (which is supposedly a 1:1 recreation of the original) and I gotta say.. in person it also makes no sense.

There are whole buttons that take up like the size of my phone that say things like "navigation" or "LIBRARY". And then a weird maybe circle in circle thing that has 40 individual buttons sliced through it. Now making user interfaces for naval ships that make no sense and kill people is very on brand for the real life navy but come on.

mllaneza posted:

A2 Starfleet Academy series has been pitched several times since TMP hit theaters. Maybe it'll actually happen this time, maybe it won't. If it happens instead of Pike's Enterprise then i'm gonna be upset.

large_gourd posted:

see it's weird because for the first two episodes my feelings were kind of neutral with a few negative exceptions mostly because it's so sparse and disjointed as a narrative so far i couldn't really tell what the show was actually trying to do, but now that the shape is starting to take form - a little! still very sparse and disjointed - the weakness of individual components of the show is beginning to distinguish itself.

i hate being like this with all the negative opinions, and with anything else i just drop things as soon as i find myself doing that, or at least pay far less attention. i didn't watch discovery s2 because s1 was so bad and i could tell it would never improve to a level i'd find entertaining. i might just drop this even quicker, since a lot of the stuff i'm not liking is the same poo poo as in Discovery, even though the show as a whole is a lot less thump bang action (so far).

i mean - rafi sucks, commodore sucks, the evil romulan sex siblings suck, soji is boring, the worldbuilding of star trek is just being treated like poo poo, destroying things which have been long established and only replacing them with lazy modern day analogues.

on the other hand, laris is great, agnes is cool and likeable, and it (kind of) has picard in it. i also like the opening theme song and most of the music so far, it's fittingly elegant.

i just want star trek to be good.

marktheando posted:

Are cheerleaders really still a thing in 2020?

PostNouveau posted:

Shocked to find out they're brother and sister this episode.


It was OK the first time they did it in Episode 2.

Establishing shots in nuTrek are all 360 rotation crane shots pushing in for kilometers apparently.

RedneckwithGuns posted:

I haven't read every post since the last episode came out but am I the only one that thought Ramdha the borgified Romulan lady was played by Sigourney Weaver? I had to look it up and she's not but it was driving me crazy.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Thanks for clarifying, and that's an interesting take.

I'd say then that you're arguing that Raffi is stuck in the 'basics' portion of the hierarchy of needs. Which I agree with.

I still think the framing is messy, which was my argument all along. With her firing ("You tender your resignation, and my rear end gets fired" - a very corporate characterisation of Starfleet and at odds with what we've previously seen) and her entire speech about Picard's class insulation ("Your very fine Chateau, big oak beams, heirloom furniture. I'd show you around my estate, but it's more of a hovel so that would just be humiliating" - again, very capitalistic and at odds with what we've seen before). Also, this episode went even further in changing the idiology of the Federation than the last one (Picard now says that half the council didn't want to help the Romulans before the attack and the rest are basically reactionary cowards.)

So is the setting of Star Trek and "the Federation" really the best fit for their story if they had to change so much of the world to force it to work?

My alternative theory was that they had the characters and plot written with little regard for the setting, which was then grafted on as a bit of an after thought. That's why it feels so incongruous to a lot of people, they're getting a lot of change that feels unmotivated and a lot of 21st century framing along with it. Picard even keeps saying "I never thought I'd see this", well yeah no poo poo. It's like even the writers can see that this is inconsistent, but just hanging a lampshade on it isn't enough.

I think writers are in such a rut that no political or ethical story is possible except for "one good man against the system". And y'know, that's understandable in this hell world, but there's plenty of other mediums to tell that story in (all of them, if the rest of TV is anything to go by)

Noise Complaint posted:

I honestly don't think that there's many more Trek connected writers than Michael Chabon.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/18/the-final-frontier

large_gourd posted:

if it actually turns out that all the poo poo like factory labourers existing, people using money and class division being a relevant concept actually end up being addressed or wound into this theme of the federation rediscovering its moral compass as opposed to just some stuff the writers threw in because they didn't think about it then i'll be happily surprised.

it isn't just because the federation isn't perfect, or even mainly because of that, it's because there are a lot of things floating around in the show that just seem like mistakes. stuff they put in because it's reflective of what is in other tv shows these days, not because it fits. there's a lot of stuff which just flat out isn't good or comical like rafi's entire introduction and commodore oh wearing sunglasses. if the show was really tightly written and put together and happened to be portraying the federation as hosed up, i'd also be thinking well fine, they're telling a story.

it's because everything else is shaky as poo poo that they aren't getting the benefit of the doubt so far.

Acer Pilot posted:

i hope we get an entire episode about mot next

e: i heard one of my co-workers saying that they thought picard was a great show. maybe we're the only ones who think this is terrible!?

nine-gear crow posted:

Just a reminder, this thread is the nexus of the Venn diagram that is TVIV and the Star Trek fandom, two of the bitchiest, most umimpressible collectives of bores on the modern internet. Your Milage May Vary significantly between what this thread thinks of Picard and what Normal People think of Picard _{(they seem to really like it, fyi).}

quote:

https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/star-trek-picard-episode-5-review-a-successful-rear end/1900-6417413/

"Stardust City Rag" continues an upward trend with Star Trek: Picard, where the show continues to build on the foundation it painstakingly built in the first three, much slower episodes. Its lighter moments are a nice change of pace, even if they stray a little toward the goofy, but Episode 5 also brings in a lot of serious character development that's further expounding on Picard's themes. With Episode 5, Star Trek: Picard strikes a precarious balance between the fun Trek adventures of the past and its darker, grittier take on the franchise, and it's one of the better episodes because of it.

SpeakSlow posted:

So could someone tell me why there's a marked focus on camera angles in the thread? Seriously curious.

Mooseontheloose posted:

I think the problem with this episode is that it basically killed the momentum of the 4 episodes before it. I get that they wanted to do a rando planet episode to explore life outside Federation reach and wanted to go with an old school ridiculous undercover op episode as a throw back to previous series. But the plotting was weird, fridge-ing a character to give 7 motivation, and just a janky plot that went piratically nowhere kinda just made this a bad episode.

Also, the problem we have in modern tv and this type of trek is serialization. We have to take the series as a whole because everything interlocks with each other and if they fail to stick the landing it makes watching the previous episodes feel useless. I'm still enjoying it but yikes, that episode was bad.

That being said, I'd watch a series with Rios as Captain of the Enterprise F. Pragmatically moral Captain I guess?

Brawnfire posted:

What if Picard just stopped appearing in Picard entirely and they never addressed it

tarlibone posted:

(I liked this episode, it was funny) × 12

I thought it was pretty funny how "connect brain to computer to make me better" was an idea that someone would try, and I like to think that there's going to be a regulation named after Ensign Dipshit because of it. Or, at least, a warning. I mean, "don't drink bleach" is something bleach companies have to say now.

We need a warning label with an ANSI-style symbol of a brain connected to a computer, and the computer turning evil and assimilating things.

"DO NOT CONNECT TO BRAIN. MALEVOLENT SENTIENCE AND BORG-LIKE BEHAVIOR MAY RESULT."

I also really enjoyed the Badgie B-plot. I think they're doing the budding romance (maybe?) between Rutherford and D'Vana well. The first part of the holodeck adventure was fun to watch, as far as cartoon workplace science-fiction sitcom romances go.

And speaking of the holodeck--they didn't go all fancy-walls, like on Voyager. This is the standard black surface + yellow grid from TNG, making me think that it's just the older model of holodeck and the Cerritos has it because Starfleet is in no hurry to make that particular upgrade.

DaveKap posted:

Latest ep of Lower Decks was on point. And if you had an eagle eye you would've seen the balloon out the front door in the first shot and been suspect of the entire trial.

Also John De Lancie is back as Q. Q officially bothers the crew of the Cerritos. This is now canon and real and his episode that stars him will be the best in the entire show. I look forward to it as much as I look forward to the next episode making fun of JJ Trek.

3 big guffaws and a dozen other laughs. Just fantastic.

HD DAD posted:

I’m just tired of big, season-long puzzle boxes. It was fantastically novel in the early 2000s, and then pretty much standard in the early-to-mid 2010s. Now it’s just...it feels outdated. Big, “epic” shows just tire me out now. That market is just beyond saturated, and I find myself just wanting to watch Derry Girls on repeat instead of a Discovery that’s weirdly trying to ape Moffat-era Doctor Who.

And I say this as someone who has enjoyed both of those things. This is just my rare whine, and Disco would be so much better if it just didn’t take itself so goddamn seriously.