Star Trek Discovery: The Bryan Fuller TV reboot

lol I watched the original Mudd ep the other night w my daughter and the entire time I was distracted by the highly visible shaving line all around Carmel's neck.

Fucking hell it's tomorrow

I have concerns but I really *want* it to be good

I guess I hadn't been paying attention but, uh, you have to pay for some CBS streaming service to watch this beyond the first episode? Really? I hope everyone enjoys the first ST series to last exactly one season.

It's on Netflix in the UK and a bunch of other countries

A few reviews have slipped through the embargo and been decent

This should be worth a flyer just for more Michelle Yeoh.

I'm sorry, I misunderstood: CBS is only airing the first half of the two hour pilot on actual TV. Fun idea.

If they streamed it only on the CBS app but allowed digital purchases on amazon, itunes, etc. it'd make more sense. but, afaik, they are making it only available on the CBS app

so irritating, I'd shell out for the entire season purchase even if it trickles out a week at a time as per usual

i'll probably wait until next year and stream the whole season then. or find "other ways" that will appear soon, i'm sure

I just did the free CBS trial on my tv device, but I guess it doesn't air until tonight? boo

I guess I hadn't been paying attention but, uh, you have to pay for some CBS streaming service to watch this beyond the first episode? Really? I hope everyone enjoys the first ST series to last exactly one season.

― Señor Winces (Old Lunch)

yeah i mean i know game of thrones seems to do ok and all but i'm not sure why directly adopting a piracy-based business model is cbs's schtick here

anyway when the streaming service fails they'll probably just toss it to another streaming service. doesn't necessarily doom the show.

Phase II - proposed for Paramount Television Service, a fourth US network
Voyager (1995-2001), Enterprise (2001-2005) - designed to support UPN (1995-2006)

nice ship -- too bad they haven't invented probes yet and have to send their first officer into lethal radiation

this was fun but fuck CBS for making me watch a thousand NAVY SEALS promos and then asking for money to keep watching

points for having the main plot thread be about a black woman trying to tell everybody "no really, they're going to kill all of us" and being shouted down

cbs has consistently been tightassed with digital access to its programming since the tv-web boom, it's annoying

Enjoying this!

First question: how can I get one of those dope uniforms

We signed up for free trial - canceled after 2nd ep & got a month free so 4 more episodes

But seriously $6 for 1 original show and commercials is a joke. $10 if you want commercial free? Eat a dick

A few minutes in, it looks right at least. The ship and cinematography look like a Star Trek show (vs. the new movies).

New Klingons - ehhhhhhhh. The makeup is so heavy their faces barely move.

Huh.

The theme manages to have twelve different sections, goes a bit Mahler for some reason, not very catchy

Although I speak as someone who liked Faith of the Heart so ignore me

Only seen the first hour - I feel like I can semi-credibly guess which ideas/dialogue came from Fuller and what came from Kurtzman/Goldsman. Not bad but the character-backstory shit is hacky and painful.

Thought it was ok. Will keep watching.

But yeah, the theme tune is a mess

I liked the show!

At the beginning I was thinking "hmm, is this Star Trek enough?"

But, thinking back, the best shows start out with their own scope and integrate. Enterprise was slavishly devoted to tying into continuity while not fleshing out much history. More than anything I got the impression that someone (Fuller? looked like he was the writer w/Ortzman) had an understanding of what TNG and DS9 did well.

The previews make it look like it's going to be scientific discovery (hah!) in a time of war. Which is a clearer mission statement than we've gotten recently.

Yeah did enjoy that and thought there was going to be more, but I guess CBS is running it as a weekly show and selling it on elsewhere.

Gotta free up airtime for those Chuck Lorre productions and NCIS: Anchorage.

I know it's a Toronto production, so I hate to say this but most of the sets looked pretty lacklustre. Felt like they were adding the occasional lens flares out of sheer desperation to spice it up. And yeahhh, the guys playing Klingons can't even act in all that get up. Hopefully they will sort it out as it goes along.

I'm guessing the backgrounds in the Klingon ship were put there in post-production, because they were pretty ornate?

I thought the story was engaging & the character development pretty solid for a 2-ep premiere. I am so used to expecting exposition dumps for new shows but this played out like a mini movie, it was kinda thrilling tbh

I think the Michael character has been set up with good layers & i’m really interested to follow her journey now

Doug Jones was great & I loved Michelle Yeoh

Klingon makeup looks more like the movie Romulans but dont they always seem to screw around with their look iirc?

Mr Veg had some gripes about how it doesn’t look like it’s taking place before the original series but i wasnt too bothered by that myself

I was wondering if teh original Klingons were supposed to look like evil humans intentionally. Seem to be a bit Hispanic pirate update in the tv series or something don't they? Is that why they were made to look less human.

Latest look has shades of Tudor era doublet and hose and tunic look don't it?

klingons lose a bit of menace when they sound like they're trying to talk through a retainer.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/1/1f/Shelley.png
today ish a good day to die, you turdsh!

lol

should I watch this or is it going to be totally cancelled within a year

(I hated enterprise and found most of voyager boring as fuck)

it won't get "cancelled"... i'm sure first season's in the can
also, if they're really using this as a push for CBS All Access (I wonder how The Good Fight did) they'll probably keep it alive for that alone, regardless of ratings or quality. i mean look at Netflix's insane stable of shows, who knows how well any of these do or how much they cost to keep going with the verticality of it all

i can't even imagine picking up another subscription tv service, not for this. piracy it is.

The first hour was a disaster. tons of pilot-speak where characters explain things that should be obvious in their world. tons of phrases that they put in because they sounded cool despite not making sense -- how is a species both "prey" and "bred to sense death"? the michael actress ruins a bunch of her lines. i found michelle yeoh's accent distracting, but the rest of her performance was solid. filler with an optical scrambler that lets them do the "go back to old technology" bit, which has been done frequently in Star Trek but still sucks. crap CG during the space walk.

second hour does the "balance of terror" / enemy below thing. not the best use of it but it still works. lots of forced parallels that are more coincidental than meaningful. i was pleasantly surprised by the ending.

oh and i was distracted by trying to figure out where in the ST timelines this happens -- young Sarek + Klingons gone for a century = shortly before TOS, timeline still not split. i suppose ST fans will just look it up online.

Continuity-wise, Shran from Enterprise will be happy to see they've named a ship after him... it's certainly BEEN A LONG ROAAAAAAAAAAD

I thought this took place before Enterprise?

100 years after Enterprise, or thereabouts. About a decade before the original series.

Just read it said that it was supposed to be about 10 years before the Shatner series. But that might be open to debate.

They might run into, or at least hear about, the Enterprise commanded by Christopher Pike

oh I'm sure they will at some point if not this year then next year when the ratings start to flag. expect a time travel episode with someone from TNG at some point too to revive interest.

they've already got Sarek, what else do they need?

Khan's older stoner brother Chad.

CHAAAAAAAAAD

lol

I liked this quite a bit and I think it's about as good as a Star Trek show could be in 2017. It's not what I would consider ideal, but it's what works now. Hopefully, they can keep it up.

Apparently they filmed the entire season not realizing it would be the end, so the writers scrambled to write and shoot a satisfying series conclusion. That at least explains why it felt so separate from the main plot, and why so few actors were present. But also? I cannot grasp what her final mission was supposed to be. She seemed to leave Book and their son so casually, but then left in a massive starship all by herself? Huh?

The extended epilogue also overshadowed the fact that the original planned conclusion of the season was a total whiff. After all that macguffin chasing, they finally meet the progenitor and have their hands in the tech are basically just like… nah, don’t want that.

tbf braxton went through some shit

getting ready to suffer through this

I cannot grasp what her final mission was supposed to be.

It took me a bit, but it was a loopback to the Short Treks ep "calypso" where the ship's been all on its own for years and then a guy comes along and talks to the ship AI. Which I'd forgot all about. As to *why*, Ive no freaking idea, it wasnt really made clear.

But anyway, other thoughts:
I was a bit meh about the idea that they go to SO MUCH TROUBLE FETCHQUESTING to find this stupid tech, then Burnham just goes "ya know what. No one needs this, its too much" and fucking yeets it into a black hole. Did she even ask anyone else's opinion first? None of them seemed to care she did that??

After all that, Laak just dies, I guess? And Moll is just sulking? Is she gonna be hired by Kovich for some section 31 or timecop shenans?

Saru and Trinas wedding was v pretty. Was rather odd of Michael and Book to just nope out and not say goodbye to anyone though. As Jeffrey Combs would say - Rude!

somehow appropriate that they made the finale the worst episode of the entire series.

I actually quite enjoyed the first hour - I was expecting a far worse conclusion to the dopey season plot, I thought the visuals were actually pretty cool - the last 30 mins was colossal toss but in its own way this was quite on brand for Discovery

but far out so many fucking hugs ffs

I kind of like the idea that David Cronenberg's entire mission in life is to fix Star Trek canon continuity problems.
Not the character Cronenberg plays. I mean actual David Cronenberg.

well that was pointless.
tng did it in a first season episode where riker becomes a q. i didn't buy it that time either.
if you could prevent children from being murdered, would you really not do it? prevent a little suffering. warm your socks. you don't need to do big things with the technology.

discovery's writers' room spent time on the real issues:

That was an ongoing writers' room debate. According to canon, Klingons have two organs, they have two of everything, right? So we had this debate. When we say two of everything, does that include the penis? I think this was something that (director Akiva Goldsman) really liked the notion of. He just kept joking, 'Klingons have two dicks, Klingons have two dicks.' And then he finally went ahead and showed it on television.

blessed

The episode showing that also had Cliff Howard as an Orion drug slinger when the crew goes undercover, I believe.

just reflecting this morning on the total wrong-headedness of finishing your series with a tiny bit of continuity housekeeping that addresses a short film that nobody has actually seen

(and also to have the Cronenberg reveal be a callback to the least-watched (?) of all trek shows without any explanation for viewers who don't have that context)

Supposedly had they done a season six, it would have used that short as the basis for its plot. Of course when you realize you only have the time and budget to film a 20 minute summation of the series, that may be the time to leave that plot idea behind.

Yeah it was only sheer chance I've been finally watching Enterprise so the reveal was really relevant and an OMG moment for me. I'll be honest, I'm enjoying ENT way more than I thought I would!

I'd usually agree with the sentiment that this kind of ridiculous fussiness is unnecessary but c'mon this is the series whose central premise is the main character is SPOCK'S SISTER ARMIN TAMZARIAN WHOM WE WILL NEVER SPEAK OF AGAIN BECAUSE CONTINUITY -- pointless convoluted callbacks is 90% of the show!

Yeah I did find myself thinking "what has happened to her Vulcanness?". Am I right in recalling she was very stiff and Vulcan in her demenour in S1 cos of how she was brought up? All that just went out the window eventually. I honestly wonder why they even had that storyline - it didnt really add/enhance anything canon.

Vulcan sisterhood was ridic contrived but I was ultimately fine with it as a pretext to bring Spock into the show - the Spock era of Disco is probably my favourite bit

and would cheerfully argue there is quite a difference between referencing Short Treks and referencing universally-recognised Trek icon ACTUAL SPOCK