Star Trek (Dis): The Butcher's Knife Cares Not for the Lamb's Cry

[J!!]

Opinionated Discovery Episode Guide watches Michael try to figure out what to do with the hideous monster the captain has locked in his closet.

[J!!]

personally, i do love that title; it's exactly the kind of cheesy, overwrought pretentiousity that never fails to make me smile.

regarding the content of the episode, i think it did a good job of laying out just how the show was going to approach its subject-matter & storytelling. the war is portrayed very humanistically, rather than just abstract facts & figures about battles and territory; it gives a very strong sense that there are very real lives at stake. meanwhile, it shows us how the various characters approach problem-solving, and sets up the starting points from which their relationships will evolve. and for once, a named character does the stupidest thing possible, and gets exactly what they deserve for her stupidity (her shirt may not have been red when she went in there, but it sure as hell was when she left), making it very clear that dangerous shit is actually dangerous on this show.

i also love that lorca has literal skeletons in his closet.

[GandALF]

Is this episode really that "dark" or "cynical"? It's fits with Roddenberry's initial space western idea for TOS before he became completely obsessed with utopian claptrap. Redshirts died because it was the final frontier and frontiers are dangerous and there's no goddamn day care on the ship. Here we have Lorca and Stemets being a marshal and his deputy arguing over the quickest way to get to a small town being attacked by outlaws.

[kaingerc]

I really have no idea how Saru's "Bovine-sense" works.
Michael being near him sets it off because she's a potential threat to him but the tardigrade isn't?
Does that mean he doesn't even need to antagonize Michael for her to maul him?
Or does that mean he needs to be aware of the threat for it to start tingling? (Which makes Michael's test pointless)

[AlucardNoir]

That architect designing a deck comment.... god dammit Chuck, you made me think of The Fountainhead. And you know whats really annoying? you didn't even need to use any logic to tear down Rand's argument, her "argument" was the but of your bad joke. Still, I don't like being reminded of Rand, and in a STD review as well.

[Aotrs Commander]

Yeah, I definitely am not feeling Discovery, myself - the bits of the first episodes I saw myself and the synoposis I've seen here are just not appealing to me at all. And I like - even now - Voyager and Enterprise! (I mean, the starship battle I found less entertaining than the ones in say, the end of Linkara's last story arc, which is pretty poor for a big-budget (by comparison anyway) TV show.) At the point the writer goes "anyone can die!" is also usually the point I go "then why should I care about anyone, then?" since I personally feel character death is a tool best used very, VERY sparingly and should never be used for cheap dramatic tension (usually because I find it doesn't work). And you can blame Marvel comics for that.

(No, I don't have any truck for either media version of a Singing Game of Icy Regent-Chairs on Fire, either! Save for that one skit Seseme Street did on it.)



On the other side, I have watched a couple of episodes of Orvilee (five and six or six and seven or something, I apparently missed the first few because there was no indication it was coming on over here), and I quite like it. It definitely has flaws, but it feels more like Star Trek than Discovery does to me. (Notably, I have not seen any evidence of any humour in Discovery, and that is an absolute stone-dead killer for me. I don't know whether that's just Chuck's reviews (though I wouldn't have thought so) or the show is taking the Space Above and Beyond approach of considering that beneath it or something.) Granted, the characters in Orville can be a bit... Dumb and Seth McFarlane's humour can be hit-and-miss. But, Orville, I feel, sort of feels like what would happen if you got a group of moderately capable roleplayers around a table and then made the show off of the transcripts of their sessions or something, so I can forgive it a bit.

I will, then, be very interested in what Chuck thinks, when we get to a review eventually. (And also whether my opinion is more a minority here or not.)

[kaingerc]

I am the last person to defend ST:Dis and some of the choices made in that series but at least I managed sit through the entire season (maybe it was the brand recognition or the pretty special effects)
Unlike The Orville where I gave up after watching one episode.
Yeah, I know you're supposed to give a show at least a few episodes to find its voice but by god it has been a while since I have seen such a tone deaf episode on TV.
The Orville was like 70% generic sci-fi series, 30% Family Guy frat boy humor and the transitions between the two tones were just painful to watch.
Hell, in the first five minutes of the episode you had the main character being cheated on by his wife, which you could see had a huge effect on him, followed by an alien ejaculation joke.

[Aotrs Commander]

I am the last person to defend ST:Dis and some of the choices made in that series but at least I managed sit through the entire season (maybe it was the brand recognition or the pretty special effects)
Unlike The Orville where I gave up after watching one episode.
Yeah, I know you're supposed to give a show at least a few episodes to find its voice but by god it has been a while since I have seen such a tone deaf episode on TV.
The Orville was like 70% generic sci-fi series, 30% Family Guy frat boy humor and the transitions between the two tones were just painful to watch.
Hell, in the first five minutes of the episode you had the main character being cheated on by his wife, which you could see had a huge effect on him, followed by an alien ejaculation joke.

I am sort of expecting more of a trend to your direction than mine, but I'm interested nontheless.

Yeah, I can imagine the bottom-end of the humour is going to be the biggest turn-off for many people. I actually liked Family Guy (the first four or so seasons, anyway) and I have been known to watch South Park infrequently, so I'm not completely adverse to it. But yeah: divisive is a term I'd easily use. For me, though, there are enough bits of humour I found actually funny that it engaged me and the drama - for all the two episodes I've watched thus far) is competantly executed.

At least as far as the two episodes I've seen, remains to be seen whether it will sustain that as I watch more.

(Also the starship battle, which for me is one of the biggest factors. (My attempts to watch NuBSG - and I TRIED - were eventually skuttled by the fact I thougth they couldn't even do THAT right. Discovery actually puts me in mind of that - or Stargate Universe which I didn't even TRY to watch, despire SG-1 being my second-favourite scifi series.) Babylon 5 and War Planets Shadow Raiders (of all things) still damningly hold the starship battle crown after coming up to thirty years.)

[Fianna]

At the point the writer goes "anyone can die!" is also usually the point I go "then why should I care about anyone, then?"

I hope you only apply that reasoning to fiction instead of to real life, 'cause, hoo boy, that is some high grade nihilism.

[CharlesPhipps]

At the point the writer goes "anyone can die!" is also usually the point I go "then why should I care about anyone, then?"

I hope you only apply that reasoning to fiction instead of to real life, 'cause, hoo boy, that is some high grade nihilism.

No, because it's everyone WILL DIE in real life.

So you have to roll with it.