Star Trek (DIS): Despite Yourself

[Linkara]

I also like Discovery (I have plenty of complaints, but overall very much enjoy it and loved the hell out of the Mirror Universe arc), but I agree the vitriol is a bit over the top.

Part of it is also that I have moved so far away from the "ruined my childhood" attitude of criticism. A bad story is a bad story, but it doesn't make old stuff suddenly unpalatable. Sometimes it does, like if we know the fate of a character, but in the end the old stories are just as they are. You can have your own personal canon for what did and didn't happen and leave it at that - write your own fanfiction, only watch what you want to watch, but it feels like a lot of the attitudes about new additions to franchises simply HATE that other people enjoy it and you need to call them out for liking it, make sure they know "WELL YOU LIKE IT BUT I ABSOLUTELY DESPISE IT AND I NEED YOU TO TRY TO FIGHT ME ABOUT IT SO I CAN SHOW EVERYONE HOW WRONG YOU ARE."

EDIT: Oh, and going back to talk about the episode since there isn't enough of that - I friggin' love this version of the Mirror Universe uniforms and nothing brings me more joy than Captain Killy.

[Deledrius]

I also like Discovery (I have plenty of complaints, but overall very much enjoy it and loved the hell out of the Mirror Universe arc), but I agree the vitriol is a bit over the top.

It's annoying how the vitriol makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions about the actual flaws, too. Here, and with another recent franchise kerfuffle, both of which I think were deeply flawed storytelling. I'm not angry or going to tell anyone they can't enjoy it, but I am disappointed. Everything seems to be polarized to the extreme these days.

EDIT: Oh, and going back to talk about the episode since there isn't enough of that - I friggin' love this version of the Mirror Universe uniforms and nothing brings me more joy than Captain Killy.

I'm not a fan of how they executed the MU plot, but I agree about the uniforms. It's one of the things they got very right IMO.

[Worffan101]

I also like Discovery (I have plenty of complaints, but overall very much enjoy it and loved the hell out of the Mirror Universe arc), but I agree the vitriol is a bit over the top.

You're the first person I've met who actually liked the MU arc! Even my friends who liked the first half of the show agree that the only good thing about that arc was the uniforms.

(which, yes, A+ job by the costuming department there)

Captain Killy was funny but seemed a bit random to me.

[Durandal_1707]

I also liked the MU arc. But like I said before, it's not enjoyable to discuss it here.

[CrypticMirror]

OK. You remember Profit and Lace where we learn that sex change operations are so trivial and painless in the Federation that they can be handled on an outpatient basis within hours in any standard sickbay? Add to that the fact that Federation plastic surgery is absolutely perfect and can be done with nothing more than a hypospray and a dermal regenerator within hours, and I have a sad truth for you: The reason there logically should not be a trans character is because sex changes in this universe are as easy as switching on a light switch. This is such an easy procedure in fact that in real life everyone would be doing it for a week just to see what it's like. Suddenly going from that to ''look at me, I'm trans, here are my many crippling issues'' would be STD canon-break number 4628 by my count.

That aside though, If you really want to convince me the progressive future presented here is natural and realistic, the fact that someone is trans SHOULD NOT be made a big deal of. None of Geordi's colleagues cared about him being blind because blind people in the 24th century live perfectly ordinary and equal lives matching those of people with sight. No one made a big deal of Uhura being a black woman on the bridge because black women on the bridge are commonplace. A transman or transwoman should barely be a footnote in someone's mind by this point, somewhere between ''I want some coffee'' and ''what's on the TV?'' As I said earlier, this is one of the reasons why every Star Trek show before STD did diversity and progressive values better because they showed us a world where no one cares about whatever label you've got anymore, they care about YOU.

If P&L had recast Quark for that episode, using a female actor for female-Quark, then it wouldn't have been quite so bad. It would have had the knock on effect of making them dump a lot of the most offensive, stupid, and offensively stupid jokes.

I think there is a golden opportunity right now for Trek to do something for Trans characters, in the Movie!Verse. Recast Chekov as a woman in the next movie. They are going to have to recast the character anyway if they want to keep them, recast a female actor into the role. Have Kirk or Bones say something like "Chekov's a woman now" - "I'll update the paperwork" and then move on. Job done, much social justice cred, zero amount of effort.

Starfleet insist upon being inefficient because Starfleet ain't military and somehow they think military is efficient.

Starfleet signed a treaty that everyone else can have cloaked ships and Fed can't.

The Federation signed a treaty, not Starfleet. The Federation is not just Starfleet, Starfleet answers to the Federation civil government, and the Federation obviously does not want a traditional standing military nor does it want Starfleet to have cloaking devices. The Federation is, by and large, composed of planetary powers who got to space after living through major planet consuming conflicts, and is committed to peaceful contact. It is easy to see why The Federation and the citizens thereof would not want a lot of soldiers hanging around getting ideas, nor having to explain to potential contactees why they've got a bunch of stealth capable warships when they are trying to sell themselves as open or trustworthy.

And the civilian government deals with a lot of broader issues than just defence, so it is very possible (not to mention realistic, most governments in real life do that) that those are tradeoffs they are willing to make for gains in areas which Starfleet are not involved. Now there are factions within Starfleet that disagree with that, but what do we call it when the military (and in this case military wannabes) usurps policy making from a democratic civilian government?

[clearspira]

I think there is a golden opportunity right now for Trek to do something for Trans characters, in the Movie!Verse. Recast Chekov as a woman in the next movie. They are going to have to recast the character anyway if they want to keep them, recast a female actor into the role. Have Kirk or Bones say something like "Chekov's a woman now" - "I'll update the paperwork" and then move on. Job done, much social justice cred, zero amount of effort.

Y'know, Star Wars recently pissed in the face of a legacy character too; it was called ''Luke Skywalker throws his lightsaber over his shoulder, turns into a whiny coward, drinks milk straight from the nipples of an alien cow, and tries to murder his own nephew whilst he is asleep.''
Whilst not quite in the same league as that, giving Chekov a vagina is a great way to put your brand on life support - just like Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy have. I feel as if too many people do not understand why betraying your core fans who have been with a franchise for years or trying to appeal only to one side of the political landscape does not in fact lead to more money.
The Abramsverse does like to piss with legacy characters though so who knows? Turning Sulu gay for example - which worked so well that George Takei came out and not only pointed out that he always played his Sulu as heterosexual but also expressed his disgust at such obvious pandering to his status as the only out gay TOS actor given how they could have picked ANY character to make gay but chose his.

(If this was a joke I apologise, but I have heard so much nonsense like this played straight that I cannot tell anymore).

[Mebius]

I think my opinion while watching Discovery week by week changed. One week I'd post a reaction as wanting to tap out on the show, the next week I'd be very vocal about how much I enjoyed a new development. Discovery for me was very, very, hit and miss.

[clearspira]

I also like Discovery (I have plenty of complaints, but overall very much enjoy it and loved the hell out of the Mirror Universe arc), but I agree the vitriol is a bit over the top.

Part of it is also that I have moved so far away from the "ruined my childhood" attitude of criticism. A bad story is a bad story, but it doesn't make old stuff suddenly unpalatable. Sometimes it does, like if we know the fate of a character, but in the end the old stories are just as they are. You can have your own personal canon for what did and didn't happen and leave it at that - write your own fanfiction, only watch what you want to watch, but it feels like a lot of the attitudes about new additions to franchises simply HATE that other people enjoy it and you need to call them out for liking it, make sure they know "WELL YOU LIKE IT BUT I ABSOLUTELY DESPISE IT AND I NEED YOU TO TRY TO FIGHT ME ABOUT IT SO I CAN SHOW EVERYONE HOW WRONG YOU ARE."

EDIT: Oh, and going back to talk about the episode since there isn't enough of that - I friggin' love this version of the Mirror Universe uniforms and nothing brings me more joy than Captain Killy.

Is there really a difference between my views on Star Trek Discovery and your views on Frank Miller's Batman, or ''One More Day'', or the New 52 Teen Titans? These things took something you love, spat them out and rendered them a shell of their former selves, yes? Apply that to what I think about STD and you will start to have some idea as to why we get so vitriolic about it. (And with respect sir, you are hardly a shrinking violet yourself when you talk about these works).
As for a bad story not making old stuff suddenly unpalatable, I present to you ''Identity Crisis'' where you point out that the mind rape of Batman actually does retroactively damage many previous stories because now that despicable act is always in the background. Every heroic speech about doing the right thing is now tainted by the fact that they attacked their friend and comrade and went on with their lives for years with nary a word.

[Worffan101]

As someone who wishes that STD and its entire writers' room would go to Hell and spare the rest of us the misery of their presence, I feel that I should lay my thoughts out as simply as possible. Including the things I liked! There were some legitimately good ideas here, the problem is they didn't develop them with basic competence.

Good things first:
--The acting, bar James Frain and some of the bridge furniture, is uniformly good. Sonequa Martin-Green is a legitimately talented actress and I CHALLENGE anyone here to find someone who can take material as generic and weak as she's given and make anyone pay any attention to her character. Michelle Yeoh is top-quality talent and she's having so much fun as Empress Georgiou-von Fuehrerstein-Dracul that I can almost ignore the lazy writing.

(in fact, Yeoh is so damn good that I could switch her and Sir Patrick Stewart for a TNG revival and the only question anybody would be asking is when Captain Picard got hair and a sex change, she is absolutely that caliber of talent)

Doug Jones takes his caricature character and makes him freaking likable, even a few of the Klingons sort of emote through the obnoxious rubber. Don't knock the actors, they're doing a great job.

--The CGI effects range from beautiful to over-the-top, but USUALLY stay on the former side.

--While the Prime uniforms are meh, I LOVE the Mirror uniforms unconditionally because they are everything that a Mirror uniform should be--the baroque, silly gilt with just enough faux-practicality that speaks of a decaying fascist empire desperately trying to remind itself of its former military glory.

--Having the Captain be a shady aggressive type was a good idea. We see enough like these in one-off episodes, it just takes good development to pull off (of course, they DIDN'T develop Lorca well, but the thought counts).

--While they keep being wishy-washy on showing Tilly's implied neurological issues, as someone with severe Tourette's syndrome (coughing, stuttering, painful physical tics), OCD, and ADHD I do really appreciate that they at least had the idea to write someone with neurological issues. Last time we had that was on DS9 when the Jack Pack turned out to be traitors.

That's all good stuff! Good ideas, SOME good execution.

The problem is the writing fails utterly to deliver.

Bad stuff:

--Lack of diversity. This is a personal issue, and I freely admit that as a Red Flag-waving anarcho-syndicalist whose biggest gripe with Star Wars 8 was the way that poor Rose (the best character in that movie by far, she deserves her own spinoff) was shafted into a shitty romance arc in the third act...I'm probably the only person who's upset by this. But quite frankly, STD's characters are remarkably stereotypical and it's not really as diverse as it claims; from the one alien character being written as a cartoon stereotype from a caricature species of space cows, to the gay couple being walking stereotypes (cranky high-strung genius and supportive emotional cushion), to Fridgegate, I found the show quite lacking in terms of social progressivism. Where is the trans character (or, better, characters plural)? I get that there aren't many transmale actors, but there are plenty of trans women in acting. Surely Jamie Clayton's available? Why is it the gay guy who's killed? Why not kill off one of the bridge furniture? Just don't fridge another gay guy and have him come back as a ghost in the Matrix, ffs. How about a bisexual woman and a trans man as a couple? Have them get married at some point and be the only ones to survive happily? Hey, maybe some more aliens! Make the XO an Andorian instead of a space cow, and have a Tellarite sitting at ops (or just make Tilly a Tellarite, that would work too). It's space in the future, if we can't have maximum LGBT-friendliness in the Federation which LITERALLY runs on fully automated luxury gay space communism, what exactly is the POINT?

--Poor follow-through on good ideas. Captain's probably evil? OK, lots of ways you can go with that. Captain's actually Mirror? Trite, but you can go places with that. Maybe he's terrified of going back, or he's so happy in the Federation that in a warped Mirror way he believes in doing whatever's necessary to defend it. Hey, that can bring in Section 31 if you really have to go that route, he gets involved and Burnham argues that they're unjustifiable! But, the Captain turns out to be Donald Trump as performed by Snidley Whiplash? That's just boring.

--Inability to write Burnham as anything more than The Protagonist. Burnham reacts to every. Single. Problem. in an emotional way. To the point that I was rolling my eyes and whispering to my friend "Yeah, now watch the cow be the logical one because he's a dude and Teh Wimminz are all weepy--can you GET more stereotypical?" She's supposed to be raised by Vulcans, yet she acts like Luke Skywalker. Also, why open with her being a racist? The whole show has this nasty neoconservative-apologism tone throughout where preemptive strikes are justified and The Enemy are evil monsters who gloat about being evil. Burnham's heel-face turn at the end is basically "I hate Klingons!" "But you porked one without knowing it." "Oh, OK then I guess I don't hate Klingons." I'm sorry, but I can write a better story about racism than that and I write fanfic.

--Mystery box storytelling. This isn't surprising given that the EP is a moron who's never written or directed a good production, and he's pals with Abrams, but this kind of lazy BS where they rely on random shocking swerves and faux-mystery instead of actually planning out the solution to the mystery or the plot arc of the season beforehand is just not good writing. Alex Kurtzman--who is responsible for stuff like Star Trek: Into Darkness and The Mummy (2017), and those are among his BETTER movies--is simply not up to writing something that requires planning as careful as a war arc does. He has repeatedly--on stuff ranging from Into Whiteness to Lost--proven himself to be incompetent, and his lying sidekicks Berg and Harberts were literally reduced to lying to the audience to maintain drama after "Despite Yourself". And speaking of which...

--Fridgegate.

I fucking hate fridging. In fact, I'm leery of killing LGBT characters at all, because the most common, laziest way of "writing" for such a character is to kill them off and make them a tragic Too Good For This Sinful Earth archetype. That's really not cool; it robs people of representation and tells LGBT people that they can look forward to dying horribly and making everybody else sad. Is that really the message we want to send to gay kids?

A gay Trekkie wrote a very good analysis (far better than I, a straight cis person, could produce) about why the fridging of Culber was deeply personally harmful to him and harmful to LGBT people in general here: https://geekdad.com/2018/01/star-trek-d ... -10-recap/ This is the exact same bullshit that the CW pulled on "The 100"--the BS that the freakin' CW, AKA Queerbaiters Anonymous, was smart enough to not pull a year later when Floriana Lima left the cast of "Supergirl" so she could go be on the Punisher*.

It is 2018. Yes, I know, current year argument, but we have had a mainstream PG-rated Hollywood romcom about a gay dude, our country allows gay people to get married, and the CW is putting a trans actress on "Supergirl" to play a trans character. It is simply no longer acceptable for mainstream entertainment media to tell stories from the 1990s--and fridging is VERY much a '90s and early-2000s kind of storyline.

I do not know a single person who was able to continue defending STD after Fridgegate. Even the people who genuinely loved the first half and argued fiercely at every point I made against it, couldn't stand Fridgegate. It was an indefensible, evil, craven, and lazy thing for the writers to do, and it spoke to their fundamental lack of respect for their audience and the intelligence of said audience, not to mention their fundamental disrespect for the very passionate and devoted LGBT Trekkie community, who had been over the MOON when STD promised to have openly LGBT characters.

I say this without remorse or reservation: Fuck Aaron Harberts. Fuck that lying, queerbaiting, lazy bastard and the horse he rode in on. Fuck the STD writers' room and every single person who signed off on fridging Culber. Fuck every craven executive, unimaginative producer, and dimwitted lazy Alex Kurtzman who approved this. I hope that they all never work again.

--The sense of betrayal I felt at numerous points in this show. Star Trek should be about basically decent people trying to do good. That was what DS9 was about, and DS9 was by far the best series. Trek has always strived to be something uplifting, portraying a future where people are mostly, even if misguided, trying to do good. A future better than ours, that we can look forward to, where people fight for peace and freedom and ACHIEVE it. That's why Star Trek is my favorite sci-fi franchise, just like Captain America is my favorite superhero. Both represent an idealized manifestation of my country's ideals, an imperfect Humanity striving for good and self-improvement, and an ideal of freedom and equality to be strived for. Star Trek and Captain America keep me going when I feel my darkest. When depression and stress and Cheeto Hitler threaten to get the better of me, I go watch Worf refuse to surrender to a Jem'Hadar first, crawling to climb back to his feet even as all his friends beg him to submit, or I read a comic book about Captain America punching Nazis in the face, or I just watch the Captain America MCU movies and feel better about myself.

Watching Discovery was like reading "Secret Empire" and watching Captain America say "Hail HYDRA" unironically.

--Oh, yeah, and the Klingon makeup sucks, to the point that I know people who actively dreaded the Klingon scenes because the actors were unable to move or emote very much.

*Granted, the CW's solution was to have a really poorly-handled breakup arc that pissed off the entire fanbase, but it was objectively better than fridging.

[Madner Kami]

lol