TOS - Is There in Truth No Beauty?

[Riedquat]

It's a concept that I find kills suspension of disbelief stone dead pretty quickly I'm afraid.

[CrypticMirror]

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

[TGLS]

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

I dunno; if you can accept silly psychoflexis mind powers and all powerful god things I don't think it's that much of a stretch to have mushrooms that can teleport objects across vast distances.

[clearspira]

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

I dunno; if you can accept silly psychoflexis mind powers and all powerful god things I don't think it's that much of a stretch to have mushrooms that can teleport objects across vast distances.

Y'know, people knock technobabble. They mock "quantum interplexing neutrino fields" and such shit. But at least that implies some kind of science beyond our understanding is behind it.

But mushrooms will always be mushrooms.

[MightyDavidson]

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

I dunno; if you can accept silly psychoflexis mind powers and all powerful god things I don't think it's that much of a stretch to have mushrooms that can teleport objects across vast distances.

Speaking for myself, that's actually the least silly thing Star Trek has asked me to accept. Yoinking out Spock's brain to run a computer, an act done by people to stupid to run said space computer and without actually killing Spock, is far sillier.

[Riedquat]

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

Up to a point. Some things I can shrug off, others pull me right out. The "see something and it destroys the mind" one is usually the latter; I suppose as someone else has said the Langford Basilisk version isn't quite that bad; rather far-fetched but could work in a situation where a background has been set up to establish it. And you can sometimes get away with it in fantasy or horror, by putting it down to some sort of fantastic power, but it's a bit too much of a cliche.

[clearspira]

I just watched the review again and Chuck does make a good point about the choice of actress to convey the ''good is beauty'' message. I genuinely do not wish to be offensive because proto-Pulaski here is by no means ugly, but the resting frown she has, the way she carries herself, and the fact that she's not as conventionally attractive like someone like Rand, does harm the episode because it further harms suspension of disbelief.
The monster that kills you because its ugly is bad enough, but when you are told that someone is so incredibly awesomely amazing and they're... well not, you start to get drawn out of the work.

Chuck is also right about the bulldog analogy. But I don't think that's what they were going for.

[CrypticMirror]

Diana Muldaur had been a guest star the previous year, and she looked fantastic in Return to Tomorrow. So I can understand why they cast her and why the script referred to her that way, I can only assume that since less than a year had passed between the two episodes that her appearance in this episode must be a creative choice by the director to make her look a certain way. Maybe that sort of haughty permafrown was in fashion in the late sixties or something, and the show wanted to cash in on that. Does she look like a more famous celebrity in this who was a hot ticket at the time?

[Beastro]

The idea that a moment of visual stimulus could destroy any human mind is just silly. Now, if we were talking Langford Basilisks, that might be somewhat plausible - but they require more than a moment's exposure and take more time to cause an effect. And even then we don't really expect to find them in reality - we're the long product of evolution, after all, and the worst failure we can plausibly expect is a 'warm reboot' of a mild seizure and return to consciousness.

It's just a conceit in a 1960s TV show. Not all the ideas in science fiction, even good science fiction, need to be good.

Sci-Fi grew from the symbolic roots older storytelling, and whether you like it or not, much of the best Sci-Fi keeps that intact. Only hard Sci-Fi that really owns up to the overt intentions of Sci-Fi ever really is "true" Science Fiction.

An example of classic Sci-Fi is Alien. It is not science fiction as people would like to think, it is old mythology repackaged in a Sci-Fi skin to express old truths about the unknown and the formless chaos which lurks within it.

Star Trek is entirely in the bounds of this form of Sci-Fi. It is why certain "hard" episodes of Sci-Fi shows stand out as exceptional, like the one of Stargate Atlantis where the puddle jumper was stuck halfway and they had to troubleshoot how to get it the rest of the way through.

In this case, the symbolism of a gorgon or basilisk is deeply symbolic and mythological, it is just being explained through a materialist lens of the physical interactions of such a creature with people rather than just taking the symbolism as a given. In the case of the Gorgon, that has to do with the stunning effect women can have on men and the dangers around it, with the basilisk, the dangers around another variant of reptile and why so many monsters in mythology of reptilian.

If the story is good enough I can suspend quite a lot of disbelief. Still more believable than magic space fungus.

Hehehehe, but.... why?

The symbolism of a Gorgon alien or a alien god is already there embedded with symbolism meaning for you, the mushroom has none and is just a contrivance to create something new and very different from the norm to be just a new technology.

It would be stupid, but it would at least be something is Discovery was trying to express some psychedelic theme about the mushrooms having some deeper meaning behind how they operate, but the same mentality that was put into Species 8472 was put into them ("Let's make something powerful, but exotic, so it'll be organic!!!")

Diana Muldaur had been a guest star the previous year, and she looked fantastic in Return to Tomorrow. So I can understand why they cast her and why the script referred to her that way, I can only assume that since less than a year had passed between the two episodes that her appearance in this episode must be a creative choice by the director to make her look a certain way. Maybe that sort of haughty permafrown was in fashion in the late sixties or something, and the show wanted to cash in on that. Does she look like a more famous celebrity in this who was a hot ticket at the time?

Sorry but I gotta disagree. She was a very pretty gal and I have a thing for cold, haughty chicks (especially with some form of RBF, which her frown qualifies as) that channel a form of stubborn British dignity about them, even if they're not British (Grace Kelly was another). She's ok here. TNG they pushed her too far to be unnecessarily antagonistic... that and her hair. If we're studying her looks, the 80s hair she had spoiled her as she wasn't bad looking for her age.

Now, is she as pretty as the plot requires? No, this is 1960s TV and they had a budget alongside the fact that TV at this time was very much more in the "audience make believes to fill in the blanks" period of TV that is very much reduced to a minimum now.

I'd rather argue she was lucky to be cast when she was 30 at the time. If I wanted to go with a TV actress to look stunning for such a part I'd have thought of someone like Lola Albright, but she was in her mid 40s by then and we all know that wouldn't fly.

[TGLS]

It would be stupid, but it would at least be something is Discovery was trying to express some psychedelic theme about the mushrooms having some deeper meaning behind how they operate, but the same mentality that was put into Species 8472 was put into them ("Let's make something powerful, but exotic, so it'll be organic!!!")

No, I think the whole thing being organic was an artifact of when Discovery was envisioned as an anthology show. You kill the Tardigrade/Stamets/The Mycelial Network at the end of the season, conveniently explaining why the technology is unavailable for the rest of time.