Star Trek: Discovery Season 2 trailer and panel

[Deledrius]

Stunt casting is still stunt casting, and I was including that in my reasoning. Even Stewart couldn't save Nemesis.

STO clearly has this problem. They fish around to see who's desperate enough for a paycheck, and then write some dialog around whichever poor Trek alumni bite. Now it's not like they have any other option given what I'm sure is a very limited budget, but the nature of this casting problem shows in the work, and it rarely produces a good story in any medium.

[Karha of Honor]

--Hated season 1. Hated its aesthetics, hated the lack of diversity, hated most of the characters, was appalled and disgusted by The Fridgening, hated that there was no trans character (it's Star Trek in 2018, we had a quietly genderfluid character on DS9, where's the trans character already?), hated the Mirror Universe arc especially, and most of all hated the completely incompetent writing.

--Liked the trailer up until that godawful music started. The space-opera-y premise has a lot of potential IMO.

--Then the music reminded me that Discovery is where potential goes to literally die. Not hugely into most of the visuals, the music was godawful. At least the transporter effect was neat? And Pike's uniform was OK.

--Really, REALLY don't like them trying to tie everything to Spock. Don't force the nostalgia connection. Just have Spock...kind of exist, in the background. This just reeks of desperation.

--I still don't like Burnham very much as a protag but that's largely because I hated season 1 so fucking much.

--The finale joke made me roll my eyes. Bad pacing and much too topical humor.

Overall? 3/10, makes me worried for the future.

hated the lack of diversity,

What do you mean?

I mean that out of the protagonists who get actual character, we have a straight white guy, a gay white guy, a black woman, a straight guy who's probably of Arab descent but has a bog-standard white guy name, a white woman, a cartoon caricature of a cowardly alien who comes off like the early Ferengi, and a Latino gay guy who's killed off halfway through.

DS9 was more diverse in the early '90s even if they weren't allowed to let their LGBT characters (especially Bashir and Garak, whose actors intentionally acted their characters as lovers) be openly gay, they still had Dax be openly pansexual and swap genders on reincarnation decades before Dr. Who did that.

I mean, it's 2018. Where's the trans guy? Where's the trans WOMAN for that matter, Jamie Clayton needs some work now that Sense8's done. Why is the gay dude the one getting fridged? Why did they do the EXACT same BS with Culber (kill him for shock value then have his ghost come back later) that The 100 did with Lexa that made them lose all their fans? Why is so much of the show dedicated to a painfully boring het romance that drags on like a concrete boot? Trek should be at the forefront of inclusive media, not sort of puttering around the rear.

Trek should have ideas that are forward thinking if it can, if the creative team feels they cannot do that they shoudl stick to waht works.

These are no ideas if i was a progressive i wopuld get all hot and bothered about.

With all the comments accusing DIS of being 'politically correct', 'agenda pushing' and now the accusation that its not trying hard enough... If I were a producer or writer on the show, I'd be banging my head against the wall.

Personally. I feel that what they're doing is fine and still more than most shows. Would a TG character be good, yes but I still can't say the show 'isn't diverse. As I've mentioned on another thread, there are certain things that Trek in particular needs to consider when casting for such a character.

You're always going to get "SJW AGENDA WAAAARGLEBAAARGLE" gibberish from the alt-right and that sort if you make a show that has non-white people in it, gay people in it, or a woman who isn't wearing a bikini and stripping for the hero's amusement. Those concerns can usually be safely ignored out of hand.

I'm more offended by how they make a huge loud point about how diverse they are in the promotional materials and then...aren't all that diverse.

Those concerns can usually be safely ignored out of hand.

Tell that to Star Wars.

[Worffan101]

Those concerns can usually be safely ignored out of hand.

Tell that to Star Wars.

Star Wars is still drawing in the money, it's just that TLJ wasn't particularly marketable or enjoyable and deeply divided even regular audience members. And Solo was a risky proposition even before it got a terrible release date and all of the prerelease buzz was nonstop negative. TFA still made over 2 billion on a script that was a lazy retread of better material directed by lazy retreader of better material JJ Abrams. Star Wars doesn't even have to engage, just ignore the Nazis until some reporter asks about them at a press conference, at which point some executive can laugh out loud and say "if the Nazis don't like it, they can just not watch our movies. We're drawing great numbers from minority demographics, the Nazis don't matter to us", which gets good PR, makes the brand look strong, and will get free publicity as "Disney exec DESTROYS alt-right!" on HuffPo.

The thing is, the alt-right are grimy little cockgoblins who will protest anyone and anything to the left of Adolf Hitler. The best move is to just show them utter contempt. It'll drive them insane, AND make for good PR.

[Karha of Honor]

Those concerns can usually be safely ignored out of hand.

Tell that to Star Wars.

Star Wars is still drawing in the money, it's just that TLJ wasn't particularly marketable or enjoyable and deeply divided even regular audience members. And Solo was a risky proposition even before it got a terrible release date and all of the prerelease buzz was nonstop negative. TFA still made over 2 billion on a script that was a lazy retread of better material directed by lazy retreader of better material JJ Abrams. Star Wars doesn't even have to engage, just ignore the Nazis until some reporter asks about them at a press conference, at which point some executive can laugh out loud and say "if the Nazis don't like it, they can just not watch our movies. We're drawing great numbers from minority demographics, the Nazis don't matter to us", which gets good PR, makes the brand look strong, and will get free publicity as "Disney exec DESTROYS alt-right!" on HuffPo.

The thing is, the alt-right are grimy little cockgoblins who will protest anyone and anything to the left of Adolf Hitler. The best move is to just show them utter contempt. It'll drive them insane, AND make for good PR.

So you have to be a Nazi to criticize the direction of Star Trek, Star Wars. What is you definition of Nazi. What core beliefs do these Nazis posses and how do they overlap with people critical of the politics of Star Wars?

Why shoudl i think that minority demographics care about the politics of this franchises to the extent that it moves markets?

[Worffan101]

So you have to be a Nazi to criticize the direction of Star Trek, Star Wars. What is you definition of Nazi. What core beliefs do these Nazis posses and how do they overlap with people critical of the politics of Star Wars?

Why shoudl i think that minority demographics care about the politics of this franchises to the extent that it moves markets?

That is not what I said at all. Did you even read what I said? I said that Nazis, or the alt-right as they call themselves now since Richard Spencer thought that would help them avoid being called out for being fucking Nazis, will hate anything more diverse than the SS and any politics to the left of Hitler.

It's entirely possible to criticize Star Wars and Star Trek from a reasonable perspective; TFA was by and large a paint-by-numbers rehash of ANH and contained a mediocre villain, TLJ still focused on that conceptually interesting but practically annoying villain, and while also conceptually brilliant only works if you've never seen Empire Strikes Back; and Solo was NEVER going to make lots of money, being a completely unnecessary origin story for a character who already had his origin story and who only fanboys really care about the backstory to.

In the same vein, the LGBT Trekkie community was up in arms over STD's fridging of a gay character (hey, protip, CBS, maybe you dickheads should look at the CW, where they killed off a lesbian character in basically the same exact way down to her death basically being for shock value, an brought her back as a ghost just as you did, and lost most of their fans because of it--maybe you shouldn't do the exact same nasty bullshit thing?), any reasonable person can point out that the showrunners lied repeatedly in their overheated "After Trek" nonsense, and you don't have to be a fucking Nazi to point out that Discovery's addiction to overblown stakes and inability to follow through on their supposed "planning" (because they didn't plan anything, they just threw stuff at a wall and took the laziest possible options out of what stuck) made for a really disappointing and nonsensical finale.

And while I love Michelle Yeoh as much as the next guy, and hey, the entire goddamn cast is acting their hearts out, even the Klingons who can barely speak around all that goofy rubber, it's pretty hard to avoid the fact that they stooped to the Depraved Bisexual trope AGAIN and that Mirror Georgiou is so pointlessly violent and psychopathic that not only is it stretching credibility that she can run ANY country for any length of time, but also it's quite frankly ridiculous that even Burnham would be gullible and/or stupid enough to believe that her creepy pseudoincestuous fee-fees for Burnham would spontaneously turn the cannibalistic mass-murdering evil opposite of Georgiou into a good guy, even temporarily.

[LittleRaven]

...it's pretty hard to avoid the fact that they stooped to the Depraved Bisexual trope AGAIN and that Mirror Georgiou is so pointlessly violent and psychopathic that not only is it stretching credibility that she can run ANY country for any length of time, but also it's quite frankly ridiculous that even Burnham would be gullible and/or stupid enough to believe that her creepy pseudoincestuous fee-fees for Burnham would spontaneously turn the cannibalistic mass-murdering evil opposite of Georgiou into a good guy, even temporarily.

Not that I'm disagreeing about the realism of any of this, but...isn't this the way the Mirror Universe has always worked? In like, every instance of it appearing ever? Yeah, it's patently absurd to think that you're going to have a functional military where assassinating your superiors is a just a regular thing that you do (DS9 had to walk that back even for the Klingons) but the Mirror Universe has always been that way. The guys all have goatees, the women all wear as little tight leather as the censors will allow, and everyone is cartoonishly evil and oversexualized to the point of absurdity. That's just how they roll over in Mirror Land.

I mean, I guess you should say they should update the concept for a more enlightened time, but they don't exactly have a lot of room to work with.

[TGLS]

I thought it was just Kira who was the depraved bisexual in the mirror universe.

[Worffan101]

I know that it's something of a Trek tradition (well, it is since Enterprise took what DS9 left and kept it going) for the Mirror ladies to be into insinuations of bisexuality, but it's just such a /tired/ old trope.

The CW, poster children for queerbaiting and angering LGBT fans, have an openly and promiscuously bisexual woman as one of their flagship heroes (well, time-travelling loser, but she's /trying/ to be a hero, see). Why can't one of the Prime women be bi and some of the Mirror ladies including her double be straight?

[FaxModem1]

I thought it was just Kira who was the depraved bisexual in the mirror universe.

Let me just point you to Mirror Garak and Worf
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOkN9dxzCWg[/youtube]

Regarding the trailer: Meh.

It could be good, if they learn their lessons from season 1, and make it more about exploration and fun, and the ideals of the Roddenberry utopia, rather than grimdark and stupidity at every corner. Discovery had a rocky season, but then, so did every first season of Trek since TNG.

[TheNewTeddy]

Discovery has a unique way of impacting me that no other series ever has before

Everything, EVERYTHING I heard about it before I watched the first episode convinced me it was going to be terrible.

The first episode convinced me it was terrible.

The second one too.

Even the third one wasn't enough to change my mind.

However, by the mid-late season I was hooked, and thought the show as just awesome.

But, after the last episode of the season, I just thought it was plain awful.

And now everything I hear about the 2nd season convinces me it's going to be horrible.


edited to add this is how I picture things:

episode 1: "hi I'm captain pike, I just gave command of the enterprise over to captain kirk even though its 9 years too early for that" "hi captain pike, I'm spock's sister can I see him" "sure he's right over there, hi spock played by the same guy as in the movies" "live long and prosper, hello sister I never speak of for some reason, I will be playing a major role in this season doing stuff I'll never talk about"

episode 4: "mr saru, even though you've shown you are competent enough to be captain, I need your opinion on something" "well captain since this scene is written to make you look awesome I'll just give you some bad advice you can later modify into something better" "ah like how riker turned dumb after the borg incident" "exactly sir"

episode 7: "we are the borg, just dont tell nobody" "k get it crew, dont tell nobody" "ok"

episode 11: "Ash Tyler!! What are you doing here!!"

episode 15: "wow that was a great series finale, too bad saru and stammets died, guess we'll never hag an alien captain, oh well we'll make the cadet the new engineer and ash can become the first officer! everything will be great!!"