Episode 6:
-A TikTok tree! I was inspired by how the VFX crew screwed up the easiest VFX in history and decided to make my own shitty CGI and call it deep.
-"It was your call, not mine" Nah fam, it was the Felix' decision, but I guess that plot went nowhere
-Booker's father is mentioned for the first time, surely that won't be important later on
-"Mr. Saru is ready for you"
-"Similar encounters" Nope, not even close. If by "Enterprise" they they mean the 1701 one, then they never encountered any subspace rifts onscreen, and ENT-D was nearly destroyed by something similar, which was made worse by their warp drive. Oh and if the rift is a rupture, then one could potentially destroy an entire solar system. And a subspace tear has a tendency to chase ships with an active warp core. Not sure what the difference between the three is, but whatever. Also, VOY only had a short encounter with a subspace thingy, when they encountered the other Nacene. But hey, those aren't important, it's offscreen technobabble that matters.
-"Our warp drive needs to remain offline" Wow, I'm surprised at this piece of continuity. Discovery writers actually remembered that the ship used to have warp drives! Or that warp drives were like super important in the franchise!
-"My feelings are an organic evolution" That's not how evolution works
-This is such an important moment... which is why we will have a montage of scenes... with characters we barely know and care... but it's exciting... they'll learn nothing from what happens next... yay... lmao
-Adira and Gray scenes... skip!
-Wait... you're actually going into the tear...rift...whatever... You're... not gonna send a probe first? WHAT? The most important ship in Starfleet and you're not gonna send at least a probe of sorts before? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! WHAAAAAAAT! You people deserve to die!
-"Isn't it supposed to be bumpy?" Ugh, what? You just passed through a "bumpy layer"! Are you by any chance the mom of that bridge officer from Excelsior that asks Sulu if they should notify Stafleet of the Paxis explosion?
-I don't recall any instances where other ships entered subspace rifts onscreen... I guess every important detail now happens offscreen.
-"Space is loud" I mean, hey, at least they specified it's "loud" as in lots of EM radiation, so maybe they're not that stupid...
-"Convert it to audio" I take that back
-"Let me send a DOT first" NOW? AFTER YOU'RE INSIDE WHATEVER YOU ARE? NOW YOU SEND A PROBE?
-LMAO, WTF, why would a robot scream? What kind of nonsense is this? It's a fucking machine, why would it have pain programmed into it? BWHAHAHAHAHA
-After masculinity, now subspace has become toxic...
-Have you tried firing your phasers at the "nothingness"? You know, those things your ship has. You didn't say anything about not firing weapons at the anomaly...
-OK, I know Frakes directed this and usually he does a good job. But there's an amateurish mistake at around 13:25. When Gray is moving to the left of the screen, the camera pans a bit from left to right, then the image gets out of focus for a fraction of a second when the actor is moving towards the camera, then the camera shakes a bit to match the actor's direction. The entire scene feels like it was filmed by a freshman at the filmmaking school. Normally they would either reshoot the scene or remove it in editing. But instead, the scene gets added right in the middle of a wide shot, where the actor is moving behind the bar shelves, which is quite distracting. I can see a few explanations for this rookie mistake: Frakes got lazy and decided to not shoot another scene, which I find it unlikely since usually he's not that lazy. Or, the actor refused to do another take, for some reason, and that's all they had, which is very stupid. Or, whoever was in charge told Frakes and the cast "we'll fix it in post" only to not fix it at all, because I guess filming is expensive smh. Either way, it's almost as bad as some scenes in Army of The Dead.
-"You must be overwhelmed" BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! DUDE! It's a MACHINE! A supercomputer! Not a real flesh and blood person! It can calculate a thousand billion calculations per second! What's next, the computer needs a day off?
-"It might clear your head" Dude... it's... a... machine... if anything, telling it to play a game would cause it to be overloaded by even more pointless information...
-"I'm not a passenger hanging out in the lounge all day" Oh yea, why are you even on the ship if you're not part of the crew? Hell, if you claim to be training to be a Guardian, shouldn't you bee on the Trill homeworld instead? Is Discovery some orphanage now?
-"We have no reference point inside the void" just... put the ship in reverse... also, ever heard of gyroscopes?
-Why did they assume that the mycelial network would have been unaffected inside the rift? Were they eyeballing again? Great...
-Oh wow, Booker' father is back... who could have seen it coming
-Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, hold... what... is... that... thing... on the inside of the spore drive chamber door?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r-q8Qj_pbA
Is that a.... hydraulic door closer? A 21st century door closer? What? AHAHAHAHAHAHA! And it's on the inside of the super duper dangerous spore drive chamber? AHAHAHAHAHAHA! WHAT? Are you telling me that 200/1200 years into the future they will still use that utter shit piece of hardware that everyone hates them today and are way too often impractical and even dangerous? Was it so hard to hide it? Just put a cutout plastic box over it, Jesus. How cheap and lazy is this show? I know they used in Picard a literal unmodified cheap lamp from IKEA, which they didn't even bother to give it a cheap paintjob, but this is even lazier. What's even more hilarious is that the damn door closer is literally in the middle of a dramatic scene, perfectly visible.
-"Now, science" "particles in the brain" yeah, OK
-The computer needs someone to tell it to tell the captain that it may detect a problem, even though this is something it should do that automatically. Said problem is the hull literally melting... which is something you can detect with a cheap IR camera. Great.
-Oh look, another white male dying a pointless death... I'm sensing a pattern here. Also, why didn't he beam out and chose to run instead? Hell, why didn't Zora beamed him out of the damaged area?
-"Not being able to do anything" The computer could have erected the forcefield like 1 meter behind the guy? Beam him out of there? What am I even watching?
-"Then your external sensors are getting some kind of input" Ugh, yeah, that's why they're called sensors...?
-"I have to tell them" Yeah, run half the ship, don't try to beam any closer to the bridge or anything... even if you weren't given a personal transporter, you can always ask the computer, and if it says no, then you can run...
-"I was having trouble focusing" Welp, they did it! The Discovery writers have managed to outdo themselves! The Discovery computer now has ADHD. It's official now. A fucking (super)computer now has attention deficit and has trouble concentrating. What's next, the computer will die from a brain aneurysm? Because at this rate, I might die from one.
-"The game helped me settle and focus" This was a line wrote by science fiction writers, let that sink in: A computer made of inorganic circuitry, who only achieved sapience because it absorbed an insane amount of data, now has trouble concentrating because it absorbed just a little tiny bit of more data and needed a coffee break to be able to focus. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
-"Greater focus creates greater awareness" You know what else creates greater detection? MORE DATA!
-"Hey, how should we create more character interaction? I mean, we have all these flesh and blood characters... oh I know, let's have the main character talk to the hallucination of a dead person! AGAIN!"
-"Anger drives you, as it did me" "We're both black men with almost no character development, we should be angry black men"
-"Tareckx" Yeah, I too would hate to have a name that looks like a keyboard typo
-"This is not a debate, Commander" Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy Saru, don't you know that when one of the nameless characters decides to do leave their station and do something random, you're supposed to just sit there and take it? What are you, some sort of superior officer?
-Our great savior Michael Burnham is giving encouragement to a computer... welp, they went there
-"I'm talking about feelings" You're always talking about feeling, Mickey.
-Ah yes, the Galactic Barrier is still a thing... somehow... and now there are particles of the galactic barrier...
-SONAR? Again with the sounds in space? Do these people heard of the expression "space is like an ocean" and actually think the space is an ocean? But then again, we had space whales, so...
-"What if everyone goes into the pattern buffer?" Given how underdeveloped most of the characters are, I assumed they already were.
-Wait, no one else tried to replicate Scotty's trick with the pattern buffer? Voyager was able to do it for a while, surely in 900 years they would have solved the kinks.
-"Please do so in groups" And everyone is literally grabbing hands, what is this, middle school? Bwhahahaha, what am I watching?
-Of course Burnham will bring them out of the pattern buffer, who else must save the day?
-"Mr Saru, I'm sorry, but I only impulsively wanted to help because a long time ago a friend died and there was nothing I could have done to save my friend" WHAT... AM... I... WATCHING... FFS! What is this? What the hell, why are you randomly just being impulsive? Why are you randomly telling people that you wanted to help because a long long time ago you went through a trauma? Did the actress just remember that she was supposed to say those lines and Frakes was like "Yeah, I'll allow it"? Hello, people, ever heard of something called timing? Relevance? No? OK...
-"I wasn't an abusive jerk dad, I was forced to be by the eeevil villains!"
-"You have to choose between Michael and you" wait, the two are still a thing? I honestly can't tell at this point.
-OH COME ON! REALLY? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! REALLY? REALLY?? They make Burnham walk in slowmo wearing that discount TRON suit while dramatic music, like she's about to do something amazing, even though she could have just beamed on the bridge, in fact I don't even know why she was away from the bridge in the first place in some random corridor, something to do with life support (should that be done in engineering or at least done by the computer?)
-Also, what is it with the shitty blue sparks everywhere? They look the same, are they using generic stock FX footage again?
-"Zora, take your bloody Adderall!"
-"I'm afraid, captain" So, the computer now has a panic attack... they've done it again...
-"Zora, listen to me. The only reason you're a mess is because I, Michael Burnham, am supposed to save the day, no matter how stupid the plot it is. And if I have to tell a (super)computer to focus and to calm down, which makes zero sense, dammit, I will do that, and there's even dramatic music while I slowly whisper!"
-"I, a biological being, will tell you, an inorganic machine, how to deal with feelings, even though I have no idea if your internal processes even work remotely similar to mine"
-Discovery is on fire! Since 2017...
-Yo, Mickey, where's your safe space bubble, maybe it could have helped you survive more on the bridge? Nah, that one only works for sound I guess...
-"I can sing you a song" Oh, fuck off
-Ah, yes, the day is saved again... hmmm...
-"What do you think?" Well, that's a 1000$ VFX, not great, not terrible
OK, I think this is the only episode so far that could have been salvaged. How? At the end of the episode, have the Discovery emerge from the other side not in the current century, but waay back in past, long before that Short Trek "Calypso". Since the ship was badly damaged, Zora uses the last functional systems to rebuild the ship to its original configuration. Calypso happens, then, when it's finally the 32nd century, more exactly right after Discovery attempted to leave the subspace tear, Zora reactivates the ship and brings back everyone from the transport buffer. And now that the ship is back to its original state, they will have to spend the final episodes solving the anomaly with less advanced technology, which would make things more interesting.
There.
chef's kiss