Star Trek: Strange new worlds

[Frustration]

Also, you point out yourself, why this technology wouldn't vanish. It's far too practical as an application, to ever do away with it. Any sort of transportation could be miniaturized to an unprecedented scale. Need to haul 500 isotons of Dilithium? Refit a standard-shuttle with extra data storage. Need to get from one side of the Federation to the other, but not have any interest in a multi-month voyage? Transporter-stasis. Need to carry around a lot of gear for an away team mission? Transporter-storage (Elite Force says hello).

Yes. Diane Duane's Spock's World is EU and thus not canon, but in it she establishes that Spock works out a method for holding certain cargo items, particularly fresh coffee beans, in transporter stasis, as it's an effective preservation method and takes up less space and energy, even expending some to maintain the buffer, than storing it whole. It's a precursor to later replicator technology. But using it on a living thing would be incredibly dangerous.

[CharlesPhipps]

It's not even a matter of canon. It's a matter of imagination. The problem they created would be much more easily handled by cryopreservation. So why didn't they address that? I could see an argument that a frozen little girl has a physical presence that would attract attention - even with their advanced energy systems, you'd still need a tank to keep her in, and where are you going to keep it? But the transporter is harder to access, and a less effective solution generally. Someone's going to notice the logs, the energy requirements (much higher than merely keeping a body very cold)...

It's just bad writing.

I think the episode actually makes it clear the reason that he's doing it in a transporter is so that he can keep her close while he, personally, researches a cure and as we see with Star Fleet, he's not SUPPOSED to be doing this and it would get him sacked. So this is not something that doesn't make sense in the setting unless you think he's being wild and reckless with technology - and the episode argues that he is.

[Mabus]

Episode 4:
This one is better than the previous ones, but it still suffers (albeit not as bad) from the same issue the ones before, namely it starts strong, but then the second half drops in quality. Seems that Kurtzman and Goldsman went to the same school of screenwriting as JJ Abrams did.

Tension was done well at first (they could have extended the submarine-like scenes since they were too short IMO), but then the Gorn suffer from plot-induced stupidity: they will pursue their prey even if it kills them pointlessly, I guess apart from wearing down their prey they're incapable of displaying any other strategy, meaning they're dumber than a house cat; they use light signals to communicate, but somehow are incapable of determining that someone else is mimicking their signal, right next to them; they give up immediately trying to chase their prey when it appears that they died trying to escape a black hole, even though they were tricked 5 minutes earlier, and for some reason they decided against making sure they weren't tricked again, they could have just waited a bit longer to see if the anything else escaped the black hole.

Also, while the show goes out of its way to show the most realistic depiction of a black hole, they somehow failed to do their research on what a brown dwarf is, not to mention that it would take millions of years for a black hole to consume one and not hours. There was no need to introduce another ticking clock, since they already had one (the ship slowly buckling under the atmosphere of the brown dwarf).

The dialogue is still bad, the hallucination dude made me laugh every time he appeared and the Gorn ship design looks like a failed pretzel. Why do all alien ships in NuTrek since 2009 have to look like some rejected artwork?

I'll give the episode a score of 8/10. I don't see the show fixing its repetitive issues, so I doubt I'll ever rate any other episode higher than that.

[CharlesPhipps]

Tension was done well at first (they could have extended the submarine-like scenes since they were too short IMO), but then the Gorn suffer from plot-induced stupidity: they will pursue their prey even if it kills them pointlessly, I guess apart from wearing down their prey they're incapable of displaying any other strategy, meaning they're dumber than a house cat; they use light signals to communicate, but somehow are incapable of determining that someone else is mimicking their signal, right next to them; they give up immediately trying to chase their prey when it appears that they died trying to escape a black hole, even though they were tricked 5 minutes earlier, and for some reason they decided against making sure they weren't tricked again, they could have just waited a bit longer to see if the anything else escaped the black hole.

As the current conflict in Eastern europe shows, if you believe that military forces will always act intelligently and without bloodthirst when it is to their disadvantage, you have dramatically misundersood how RL armies behave.

[clearspira]

Has it occurred to anyone else that the miniskirts don't make sense in-universe?
A) Discovery did not have miniskirts which is set at the same time.
B) ''The Cage'' did not have miniskirts so its not period accurate.

Its not a big deal or anything, just an observation that they've made a show that is more sexist than the one made in 1965 for no reason. In the real world we are moving away from gendered uniforms for good reason and one of those reasons is the impracticality of skirts at work and the fact that it helps to foster a workplace of inclusion. Also, I guess we are just pretending again that Starfleet isn't military and would be sending its female troops off like they are going down the pub for a night out?

[CharlesPhipps]

Has it occurred to anyone else that the miniskirts don't make sense in-universe?
A) Discovery did not have miniskirts which is set at the same time.
B) ''The Cage'' did not have miniskirts so its not period accurate.

Its not a big deal or anything, just an observation that they've made a show that is more sexist than the one made in 1965 for no reason. In the real world we are moving away from gendered uniforms for good reason and one of those reasons is the impracticality of skirts at work and the fact that it helps to foster a workplace of inclusion. Also, I guess we are just pretending again that Starfleet isn't military and would be sending its female troops off like they are going down the pub for a night out?

Notable fact 1#: The miniskirts were introduced by the women of Star Trek for TOS. They felt the outfits they were being made to wear in the pilot were unflattering.

https://comparativegeeks.wordpress.com/ ... st-or-nah/

Notable fact 2#: The miniskirts were introduced by Rebecca Romanj who hated the pants they wanted her to wear and wanted to wear the TOS miniskirt.

https://www.slashfilm.com/850009/rebecc ... ew-worlds/

[Mabus]

Tension was done well at first (they could have extended the submarine-like scenes since they were too short IMO), but then the Gorn suffer from plot-induced stupidity: they will pursue their prey even if it kills them pointlessly, I guess apart from wearing down their prey they're incapable of displaying any other strategy, meaning they're dumber than a house cat; they use light signals to communicate, but somehow are incapable of determining that someone else is mimicking their signal, right next to them; they give up immediately trying to chase their prey when it appears that they died trying to escape a black hole, even though they were tricked 5 minutes earlier, and for some reason they decided against making sure they weren't tricked again, they could have just waited a bit longer to see if the anything else escaped the black hole.

As the current conflict in Eastern europe shows, if you believe that military forces will always act intelligently and without bloodthirst when it is to their disadvantage, you have dramatically misundersood how RL armies behave.

Any space faring civilization that operates on Putinist logic would die 5 minutes once they've reached orbit... assuming they'd still have a fleet and won't get sold for scrap.

[CharlesPhipps]

Any space faring civilization that operates on Putinist logic would die 5 minutes once they've reached orbit... assuming they'd still have a fleet and won't get sold for scrap.

There's a reason the Federation keeps winning despite literally every other species* in the galaxy being authoritarian imperialist assholes.

(With the exception of the Ferengi and Bajorans)

[Madner Kami]

Any space faring civilization that operates on Putinist logic would die 5 minutes once they've reached orbit... assuming they'd still have a fleet and won't get sold for scrap.

There's a reason the Federation keeps winning despite literally every other species* in the galaxy being authoritarian imperialist assholes.

(With the exception of the Ferengi and Bajorans)

The Federation is imperialistic as well, though in the same vein as our modern day western world is. We may not march into other countries (with any regularity), but our culture is everywhere and we drag everyone into our orbit through our trade and technological drive.

Incidentally, this is why I find it very funny when the same people criticize the Federation for not interveening anywhere, while at the same time criticizing The West™ for our interventions, despite both actions being very similar in their goals.

[Al-1701]

Can I just gripe about the Gorn here for a moment.

First: Why are they parasitic breeders? There are no parasitic reptiles (though science fiction seems to confuse reptiles with wasps in this regard frequently). The closest analogue to the Gorn would be monitor lizards, which feed on insects which are high in protein and fat.

Which brings me to my second point: Assuming they are parasitic breeders, they obviously did not evolve using life forms from other planets to do so. Which means they used some kind of animal native to their homeworld. So, why are they hunting aliens and not just raising whatever they use back home? Sapient life is a terrible food source. Eating someone when you kill them in situ is one thing where it's perfectly good meat if you have no compunction about eating a sapient being, but to capture, transport, and keep alive sapient life is a lot of effort for not a lot of nutritional value. This leaves us to believe the Gorn only do this for the sake of being barbarians.

Which brings me to my final point: The whole point of the Gorn was that they are intelligent beings who come from a civilization that has just as much right to exist as anyone else. The Gorn as presented here are a scourge on the galaxy, and no one would shed a tear if someone came along and glassed their homeworld.

This isn't a "I'm not going to watch anymore" thing, but it does bug me. The Gorn were kind of ignored for all this time, and we have this collection of ill-conceived space lizard tropes replacing them.