Deledrius wrote: ↑Tue Dec 04, 2018 4:06 amI agree. I was annoyed to see Landry being played so evilly... then killed. Then the MU reveal made me think they were going to recontextualize her earlier appearance, but no. She got nothing to do except to play a horrible officer. That actress could have handled so much more, if they'd bothered. Yeoh had fun, but it was hard to enjoy watching a character that the show was obviously pretending wasn't too awful to be allowed to run free. It's a tragedy that we get more of the Empress than we do of the Captain. It tells me something about what the people running season 1 think of Star Trek (and the fact that the season 2 team appears to be carrying this forward is not reassuring).
I'm quite concerned about all this "Destiny" nonsense. They clearly don't understand how to write an interesting destiny story, based on how Lorca was executed, and it flies in the face of the secular humanism that Star Trek has embraced for a very long time. Sadly, the JJ films really started this trend, and it's one I had hoped we wouldn't see infect the show. Alas.
Pretty much this.
I came up with a rewrite concept while brainstorming with some guys on alternatehistory.com, cooked up something with Yeoh as the show's secret big bad (the idea's that Mirror Georgiou, the "Empress of Terra" ('cause that sounds awesome when shouted in a dramatic fight scene), is trapped in the Prime Universe too and is secretly working with T'Kuvma in a convoluted plot to get herself more power), so that Yeoh can have fun hamming it up as a thoroughly awful Space Nazi and shout things like "YOU CAN'T DEFEAT ME, MICHAEL! I AM THE EMPRESS OF TERRA!" in the middle of a swashbuckling sword fight as the heroes try a dramatic prison break, stuff like that, just without the blatant stupidity of "the genocidal psychopath is a good guy now because Captain Lucius Malfoy quoted Trump".
Then again my version would've taken full advantage of the streaming format to get at least 15 more minutes of screen time per episode, scrap the mushroom drive in favor of "prototype transwarp" or something like that that's always on the fritz when dramatically appropriate, Sharma's a sort of straight-edged Lawful Neutral type to clash with Martin-Green's more typical protagonist daredevil type, add a little character work for the bridge crew so they're more than just furniture (details like, redhead whose name I forget is married, her wife got hurt in the initial Klingon invasion and she hates Burnham for that, it boils over after Mirror Georgiou reveals herself and they have a big-ass fight in the mess hall; one of the minor characters is a trans man, that's part of a subplot involving his less than supportive mother who's one of those MILzillas you hear about on Reddit, sort of thing; Sharma doesn't like Martin-Green because her dad was a crook who wrecked her family and she's less than convinced of the Federation's philosophies on criminal justice, they work together to free Lorca (who's a traumatized refugee from the MU who's fanatically devoted to the Federation since it's, you know, not an evil craphole) from Empress Georgiou and Sharma sort of comes around, that sort of thing).
I also had an idea--there are
two Mudds. Bearded Mudd they meet first, he's a psychopath who does bad stuff until they beat him but he gets killed; later on they find Moustached!Mudd, who's the Prime version and a snivelling cowardly sleaze like the canonical Mudd, only one of his sleazy antics has left him in possession of evidence showing that Mirror Georgiou was working with T'Kuvma as part of an evil plan (basically, T'Kuvma lured an Important Klingon Guy to the battle site, planning to shoot him and blame it on the Federation, but a panicking Burnham, dealing with a ship on the fritz and Captain Georgiou knocked out by an exploding console, shot up the Klingon important guy's ship in a panic, starting the war), which can stop the war by causing the Klingons massive loss of face (because the Sarajevo incident here is a false flag and that makes the Klingons look bad) and forcing them into a white peace, only Mirror Georgiou finds out so the good guys have to do a game of cat and mouse for Regular Mudd's evidence so they can stop the war and defeat the Empress of Terra before she enslaves another universe.
A big theme would be self-redemption--Lorca, Burnham, redheaded chick, even Voq (who here isn't privy to the Big Plan and is basically our main Klingon POV character who idolizes T'Kuvma and comes to realize that his hero was a fraud and a scumbag) have to find a way to forgive themselves for their perceived wrongs. This is visualized thematically through scenes of symbolic atonement for the self-perceived wrongs, allowing the characters to re-live what they feel are their worst mistakes and do things better, basically. So Lorca, who's consumed by regret for his Prime duplicate's sacrifice (Prime!Lorca saved Mirror!Lorca, who was a member of a doomed resistance group who got vital intel from the Empress's lair but was caught and tortured by her before escaping with Prime!Lorca's help; they were being chased by the Terran Empire and Prime Lorca figured out the technobabble to go home, so he shoved Mirror Lorca into the tech-tech and sent him back in Prime Lorca's place, resulting in Prime Lorca's slow and painful death at the Empress's hands), willingly surrenders to Empress Georgiou so the good guys can find her ship and achieve some intel objective, Burnham defeats Mirror!Georgiou after agonizing over fighting someone who looks and sounds just like her mentor and then negotiates a truce between the Federation and the Klingons, that sort of thing.
Anyway, that's just a rough idea. What the show needs, at its core, is a disciplined writers' room, a bit more time per episode, more character work, less mushroom nonsense, characters who aren't TOTAL dickholes, and the kind of optimism we got out of DS9--where people are basically decent folks and try to do the best they can, not the Roddenberry box kinda thing where everybody's perfect and agrees on everything.
Just my 2 cents, anyway.
