Mabus wrote: ↑Sat Jun 17, 2023 11:31 am
So, was this even a season premiere? It felt like an episode of the previous season or from the middle of a season, I literally feel nothing is new, except for the intro. And there's more:
-So, is La'an on leave or resigned from Starfleet? April tells Spock that La'an is on "voluntary leave from Starfleet for months", but 40 seconds later, April calls her "former member of Starfleet". So... which is true?
April is being an asshole. He assumes La'an is planning to leave from his impressions of her. We later find out that April is also a bigot to Augments so he was probably happy to see the back of her.
-Why is everyone on the Enterprise so hostile to the maintenance crew? Is this ship for high schoolers?
Hemmer died very recently and they're very protective of the Enterprise.
-A main character has to steal the Enterprise to help someone they knew, stuck at the edge of Federation space, who sent a cryptic coded message, warning of a possible threat to the Federation... and then later a rogue Starfleet and Klingon faction work in secret to restart the war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire... they're just gonna recycle the same old plots forever, aren't they?
A Marvel writer said, "We can't have the Fantastic Four fight Doctor Doom like that. They did that ten years ago!"
And Stan Lee said, "Yeah, but it's new to someone else."
-So the Federation false flag ship the Klingons assembled in that cave is a Crossfield-class ship? At first I was like, did they rebooted the design of the Discovery? But then I remembered that the saucer section can be detached, so maybe the Klingons got a couple of Starfleet wrecks and kitbashed them together. And you can't tell me that the Enterprise blowing up the Crossfield wasn't a subtle "up yours" to Discovery...
I mean, I see it as a homage to DISCO. I also see it as they just had the model and used it.
-Oh, so now people can survive in a vacuum without freezing solid for like 15 seconds? I guess Vadic must not have been told that, so much for "the Changelings' genetic tampering weakened them".
-How many alien tourists does Earth get? After Ancient Aliens and 1950s Vulcans, now there's Travellers, Lanthanites, etc. Earth is pretty crowded.
I mean, you don't freeze to death in space anyway. You'll die of many other reasons before that.
McAvoy wrote: ↑Sat Jun 17, 2023 4:08 am
Wow this snuck up on me.
The show's been around for like 2 years almost.
No... The second season snuck up on me. Not the show.
Yeah I noticed trailers a while ago because I watch Paramount+, but never paid attention to the release date.
Pretty much this. I just haven't been following the latest developments of certain shows. I don't know if it's my interest waning, real life or something else.
So episodes 2 and 3 are two completely different shows, basically.
-I did not like the second episode. Una's whole case already relies on some pretty massive stretches of logic, as well as continuity nonsense. For starters, how did the rest of the Federation alien species accept Earth's ban on genetic engineering/augmentation, since Augments were clearly an internal human problem, a 200 or 250 year old (depending on which timeline you consider canon) problem? There are no indications that the same genetic modifications that the OG Augments could be replicated in other aliens, since the Augments were humans and it was human DNA that was modified. Vulcan, Andorian, Tellarite, Denobulan DNAs are different from humans, so any GE might produce something else. Hell, as later shown in TNG, plenty of other non-Federation species have done various genetic modifications to themselves, especially private individuals, without turning mad from those augmentations. I mean, some of them were already mad, but they didn't get madder. And given that Arik Soong pointed out that the reason the OG Augments were evil is because of the faulty GE of the time, there's no reason why alien GE tech couldn't overcome those issue. Hell, in ENT, Paxton was using Rigelian gene therapy to treat what appeared to be an aggressive form of ALS of sorts. So it's clear that there was always an exception for alien gene therapy, but not for human made one, as Henry Archer died from Huntington/schizophrenia-like genetic condition which apparently could have been cured by using Soong's research, but since that one was made by a human, it was banned. Or maybe it had to do with the fact that one condition affects the peripheral nervous system and the other the central nervous system, I don't know. But I guess, for the plot to happen, they had to invent this Federation-wide ban nonsense, which everyone accepted... which would be the equivalent of everyone in the Federation accepting Vulcan emotion suppression because the Vulcans nearly destroyed themselves 2000 years prior.
-Federation judges no longer have any authority in courts, anyone can just freely ignore them, I guess contempt of court is not a crime anymore in the future...
-On the nose "civil rights metaphor" to such a degree they might as well physically beat you over the head with it.
-The resolution to the case was extremely stupid: So Una, by enrolling on her own will to Starfleet, a Federation organization, a branch of the Federation to be exact (like US Navy is for the US government), actually asked for asylum because her life was in danger... from living on a Federation colony... She basically asked the Federation to save her from the Federation... and apparently asking asylum gives you now immunity to Federation laws that Starfleet also abides to... Yeah, I don't think the writers understand how laws work. Or how separation of powers in a state work. Or how the military works. Or how asylum works.
Honestly, the only explanation for why all of this even worked is that absolutely no one in the Federation cares anymore about the GE ban, and the only reason the trial even happened is to keep up the appearances. Basically once the trial started, everyone turned a blind eye to everything and the moment the defense brought up the flimsiest of arguments, the judge was like: "Yeah, that totally makes sense, not guilty, let's just get it over with."
The third episode I feel it's alright, better than the previous 2 and certainly better than most of S1 episodes. While it risked being dogshit, since S2 of Picard also took place almost entirely on modern day Earth, it managed to avoid that by keeping the dumb to minimum, and concentrate it in the second half.
-While I still don't think that the actor playing Kirk sounds anything remotely like Shatner or Pike, if anything he kind of reminds me a bit of the original Pike from The Cage, I feel like he did an OK job with what he was given. Did like for once we finally get to see a competent male character, since up until now NuTrek has a fetish of showing men as idiots and pussies.
-Likewise, Christina Chong did alright with the story, and it's nice to have an actor not being terrible in NuTrek, though the crying scene gave me DIS PTSD.
-They do have a nice dilemma by having two characters from different alternate timelines disagreeing which one is better one, from their POV, but once it's revealed that AltKirk's timeline is the bad one, and everyone there is just barely surviving, you'd think that he'd have doubts, but nah, gotta have the "dead brother" reveal that changes his mind. A bit too convenient IMO.
-The Romulan lady villain was kind of lame and predictable, but at least she didn't made everything all about her.
-I'm 200% certain, after seeing that revolving door scene, that Paramount is deliberately pissing off viewers and fans in order to create free advertisement for their shows. So I guess, I'll just have to not fall for the bait from now on, no matter how stupid it is...
Overall, the first half, was alright. But then the second half falls on its butt:
-Apart from the fact that there's no way one could bribe their way through the Canadian border into US, especially after that massive bombing in Totonto, which would have put the entire country in lockdown, they don't achieve much by plot-wise by going to Vermont, since they eventually return back to Toronto, so what was the point of that? They don't gain anything new, apart from a broken watch, and that alien lady doesn't contribute much to the story, apart from a cheap joke.
-What, they don't know what a Geiger counter is? The phosphors in tritium watches can be affected by anything else that's radioactive, not to mention if that watch glowed that much, they'd both be glowing too, since that would be A LOT of tritium in air. Not to mention anything else in the vicinity that's phosphorescent would be glowing as well, so if anything, rather than blindly going around in a city of 3 million people in the vain hope of finding something glowy, they'd be better off getting themselves a Geiger counter that detects beta radiation, and search the city for any radiation spikes, then look around to see if anything else, like neon tubes, glow without being on, which is how one finds radiation sources.
-Who is that secret organization? What are their goals? How do they have access to such advanced technology? Why did they secretly collected that piece of the bridge? To what end? Why did they create the augments? Why only now? And why is Khan in Canada now? Are they trying to make a Khanada joke? Shouldn't he be in India? Why was he sent at the other side of the globe? Why is Khan still a kid in the year... 2022? Shouldn't the Eugenics wars start in like the 2030s in this post-ENT timeline? In TOS, Khan was clearly in his 40s, so what the hell is going on with the timeline? Does anyone care anymore?
-The Romulan conspiracy college spy lady says that she's been on Earth since 1992, and it's been 30 years since then, I guess she missed Voyager, but what century is she from originally? She had that photo of a TOS Romulan warbird, but there's no way she's from that century, since the Romulans never had time travel back then, nor later on. In fact, how did she even get there? And why did only one time travelling agent try to stop her, the one from the beginning of the episode, that she shot? Where are the rest of the agents? And Romulans now no longer fear computers? They now rely on them to predict timelines? How and when? And wait... she says she didn't blew up the bridge, but then who? There are other Romulans with her? How many? Where? Romulans want to slow down human progress by sowing division in humans and blowing up friendship bridges...?
-Somehow the alarms go off in the building, yet there's no lockdown and only like 4 armed guards exist in the entire facility... despite housing an experimental nuclear reactor and some very important tech, the facility has less security than a bank. Again who are these people? Are they helping humanity, with their development of fusion tech, or are they trying to destroy it, by creating the Augments?
NuTrek writers need to give the second half of their script to someone else to fix, since it's clear that they run out of ideas halfway though it.
Mabus wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 4:58 pm
-While I still don't think that the actor playing Kirk sounds anything remotely like Shatner or Pike, if anything he kind of reminds me a bit of the original Pike from The Cage, I feel like he did an OK job with what he was given. Did like for once we finally get to see a competent male character, since up until now NuTrek has a fetish of showing men as idiots and pussies.
I dunno, Pike and RIos are pretty good consistently throughout their depiction. Boimler being a wuss that becomes a man is also his character arc.
-The Romulan lady villain was kind of lame and predictable, but at least she didn't made everything all about her
I appreciate they made the VOY Sarah Silverman character into a villain. It was a nice plot twist.
-Who is that secret organization? What are their goals? How do they have access to such advanced technology? Why did they secretly collected that piece of the bridge? To what end? Why did they create the augments? Why only now? And why is Khan in Canada now? Are they trying to make a Khanada joke? Shouldn't he be in India? Why was he sent at the other side of the globe? Why is Khan still a kid in the year... 2022? Shouldn't the Eugenics wars start in like the 2030s in this post-ENT timeline? TOS, Khan was clearly in his 40s, so what the hell is going on with the timeline? Does anyone care anymore?
I mean, it's Adam Soong from Picard Season 2. It's like 10 years after he got his PROJECT: KHAN going.
Also, they said the timeline was changed by the Romulans and the Temporal Cold War. This is like the ONE TIME they are actually bothering to pay attention to Continuity. Department of Temporal Investigations, Time Wars being mentioned, Romulan agents (future guy), and so on.
The Romulan conspiracy college spy lady says that she's been on Earth since 1992, and it's been 30 years since then, I guess she missed Voyager, but what century is she from originally? She had that photo of a TOS Romulan warbird, but there's no way she's from that century, since the Romulans never had time travel back then, nor later on. In fact, how did she even get there? And why did only one time travelling agent try to stop her, the one from the beginning of the episode, that she shot? Where are the rest of the agents? And Romulans now no longer fear computers? They now rely on them to predict timelines? How and when? And wait... she says she didn't blew up the bridge, but then who? There are other Romulans with her? How many? Where? Romulans want to slow down human progress by sowing division in humans and blowing up friendship bridges...?
According to Word of God, Future Guy from Enterprise was a Romulan so this is just picking up where they droped the plot. Romulans also use computers, they just don't use AI.
And yes, Romulans fucking with time to destroy the Federation is entirely their MO.
A "who am I" plot is always fun to have, but I felt this came too early in the show's run. I think one more season of character building would help us as the viewers see and understand how much is at the root of everyone's personality.
It also felt limited in scope. Una, Chapel, and Urhura were quickly sidelined so they could have the 'meh' conflict between Spock and Ortegas. Also why did the memory loss impact the ability to read? Wouldn't that also mean speech would be impacted?
... The more I write the more I'm thinking this wasn't a good episode for me...
It's OK to make mistakes as long as you don't make the same ones. If you do then you're not learning.
m4a2000 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 11:18 pm
A "who am I" plot is always fun to have, but I felt this came too early in the show's run. I think one more season of character building would help us as the viewers see and understand how much is at the root of everyone's personality.
It also felt limited in scope. Una, Chapel, and Urhura were quickly sidelined so they could have the 'meh' conflict between Spock and Ortegas. Also why did the memory loss impact the ability to read? Wouldn't that also mean speech would be impacted?
... The more I write the more I'm thinking this wasn't a good episode for me...
A great opportunity to expand on Ortega...that does nothing to expand on Ortega.
