Discovery: Choose Your Pain

[Winter]

While I do think that Discovery is, overall, a good show I do get why so many fans aren't overly found of it and it can all be summed up in the bit where the characters swear which comes off as the show trying to hard to be edgy and cool. When you get down to it Trek is about a show of, well, Discovery, to boldly go for where no one has gone before and Dis does have that but the characters cursing just out of nowhere is just so random and feels forced.

I actually had the same problem with the more resent Star Wars films, with the movies killing off the original cast, regressing character development the original cast underwent in the Original Trilogy and bits like the Green Milk scene and that's all that needs to be said about the green milk scene because even as someone who likes the surreal and sometimes offensive humor of Hey Ash What Ya Playing even I have standards. Same thing has happened with comics where the writers try to make things as graphic and violent as possible which just ends up alienating the viewers instead of drawing them in.

Sometimes it works like with the resent Tomb Raider games where they also include swearing and rather extreme violence but unlike Dis, Disney's Star Wars and comic runs like The New 52, it doesn't revel in it but instead uses it as a tool to tell the story. The bit with the swearing was really out of place with the scene even lingering on the fact that the characters are swearing in a Star Trek show which only succeeds in making it feel even more forced. When Tomb Raider has characters swear its, as Simone said, (insert grown here I deserve it) in firefly they swear when its appropriate. Which paid off when he saw a statue of Jayne in Jaynestown and then followed that up with him just saying that, "This must be what going mad feels like." And then later when the towns folk start singing about how awesome Jayne is with him then saying, "No, this is what going mad feels like."

I think they get better but bits like the characters cursing and the scene just sort of lingering on it really does help because as Chuck himself once said, they attempt to appear more mature by being more Juvenal. Still not as bad as what Enterprise got up to but still pretty bad.

[TheNewTeddy]

I'm curious how far in advance Chuck writes these, or if he's trying to keep himself spoiler free.

IE did he know how the last episode ends when he began writing the script for this episode?

[TheLibrarian]

Seems like quite a few people get up-in-arms on the F-bomb being dropped in the episode. I found it a bit puzzling but not really a big deal. It makes sense in context since Tilly's socially awkward and Stamets reacted the way most people would, but on a scriptwriting level I guess it's just supposed to be a humorous moment, and it didn't really work on that level for me.

See I loved it, because Star Trek's first F-bomb wasn't used to crudely refer to sex, or express frustration or anger, or to intimidate someone else. Tilly used it to express excitement at a scientific breakthrough, and then Stamets returned it to set her at ease and share her enthusiasm. I can't think of a more Star Trek use of profanity than that. But I'm also someone who doesn't get why so many of his fellow North Americans seem to tolerate high levels of violence and sex, often of a puerile adolescent bent--e.g., later episodes of Discovery--but a naughty word or two sends them into conniptions.

[Linkara]

I admit I did not catch the thing with Ash, either. I thought it was just well-hidden behind PTSD issues and, while confused that she was there, I figured there was a larger story going on or I was just mistaken and it was a different Klingon.

[Deledrius]

Seems like quite a few people get up-in-arms on the F-bomb being dropped in the episode. I found it a bit puzzling but not really a big deal. It makes sense in context since Tilly's socially awkward and Stamets reacted the way most people would, but on a scriptwriting level I guess it's just supposed to be a humorous moment, and it didn't really work on that level for me.

See I loved it, because Star Trek's first F-bomb wasn't used to crudely refer to sex, or express frustration or anger, or to intimidate someone else. Tilly used it to express excitement at a scientific breakthrough, and then Stamets returned it to set her at ease and share her enthusiasm. I can't think of a more Star Trek use of profanity than that. But I'm also someone who doesn't get why so many of his fellow North Americans seem to tolerate high levels of violence and sex, often of a puerile adolescent bent--e.g., later episodes of Discovery--but a naughty word or two sends them into conniptions.

I just felt it was placed there like a kid who was testing the boundaries of whether they could get away with it and what the reaction would be. Hardly a mature situation. Lingering on it the way they did was fourth-wall leaning and not remotely organic.

It was just as forced as how they kept using Data to say the same sort of things in the films. Interesting to note that both times it's the "innocent" character being used for that purpose.

[kaingerc]

I literally had to stop the Fucking episode in the middle and laugh my fucking ass off when the fucking computer said that the most notable fucking characteristics in Jonathan Fucking Archer are "Intelligence", "Compassion" and fucking "Tactical Brilliance".

This Fucking show, I tell yah.

[AllanO]

I admit I did not catch the thing with Ash, either. I thought it was just well-hidden behind PTSD issues and, while confused that she was there, I figured there was a larger story going on or I was just mistaken and it was a different Klingon.

I also did not notice the discrepancy. I think I was unclear on the timeline. For all I could figure out the stuff with the Klingons and the cloaked ship getting taken over could have happened months before the events being depicted on Discovery (and I was never clear how long after the start of the war Micheal ends up on Discovery although I'm sure someone said). Also I think I failed to consider that if Ash was captured at the Battle of Binary Stars he would have been on the ship since the beginning of the war...

I am apparently not a careful watcher of this stuff...

[GloatingSwine]

Lots of people did catch the thing with Ash almost immediately and felt very very smug about it.

A lot less caught the thing with Lorca. Turns out Ash was fed to us to make us think we Got It so we'd stop being suspicious.

[bronnt]

I haven't watched the show, and I just now got around to the review. Is the word "eugenics" being used exceptionally sloppily or is that just an effect of Chuck's summary? Eugenics is a movement that usually advocates for forced sterility or even mass murder as a means of breeding out undesirable traits. It's connected to genetic modification in Star Trek because of the Eugenics War, where engineered humans tried to control the world in order to advance a eugenics agenda. After that genetic enhancements became outlawed in an effort to prevent a dystopian type of able-ism.

Injecting yourself with a chemical isn't "eugenics," though it might be genetic modification. And it may not even be that-athletes in particular have found ways to chemically enhance their abilities without altering their genes.

[AllanO]

I haven't watched the show, and I just now got around to the review. Is the word "eugenics" being used exceptionally sloppily or is that just an effect of Chuck's summary? Eugenics is a movement that usually advocates for forced sterility or even mass murder as a means of breeding out undesirable traits. It's connected to genetic modification in Star Trek because of the Eugenics War, where engineered humans tried to control the world in order to advance a eugenics agenda. After that genetic enhancements became outlawed in an effort to prevent a dystopian type of able-ism.

Injecting yourself with a chemical isn't "eugenics," though it might be genetic modification. And it may not even be that-athletes in particular have found ways to chemically enhance their abilities without altering their genes.

First note the injection in question adds to the recipient human's genome the bits of the Tartagrade's genome that it uses for spore drive stuff, by plot contrivance only humans are compatible with the creature's genome (at least I think that was part of the story). Such genetic modification of humans (and other species?) violates the laws against the genetic modification established after the Eugenics wars. I forget whether the show itself calls modification eugenics or whether this is Chuck's innovation. The show definitely refers to the ban on genetic modification as a ban on eugenics experiments...

The various eugenics movements advocated both negative methods (forced sterilization of those with undesirable traits, otherwise discouraging undesirables from breeding) and positive methods (get healthy, accomplished etc. people to breed more) to improve human genetics. Also since I think they tended to assume that acquired characteristics were inherited technically it made sense to advocate public health measures so the people breeding would be healthier and thus produce better genetic stock. Eugenic ideas were often informed by or pretexts for ideas about inferior races, social Darwinism and so on. The most famous being the eugenical ideas of the NAZI party (so part of their justification for mass extermination campaigns) and post World War II the entire idea became far more disreputable and associated with the most repressive methods. Although forced sterilization continued to be a practice on some institutionalized individuals in places like Sweden and Canada into the 1970s (and was wider spread before WWII). Genetic manipulation via direct remaking of the material basis of genetics was not exactly an idea before anyone had a clear idea of what that was, so it is indeed not a eugenic method as such, but it has a clear relation.