Star Trek Discovery: The Trouble With Edward

[DisgruntleFairy]

I get why some people are sympathetic to Edward but I've worked with an Edward and I'm not in anyway sympathetic. Edward isn't like Barkley except in the most vague of ways. They are both smart but awkward people that's really it. Barkley wants to be a good officer and friend and he is trying. Edward doesn't want any of that. He's a self centered asshole who happens to be awkward. If hes anything like the people I've worked with in the past like him hes bullied and annoyed people to get what he wants. Then on top of that thinks hes the smartest guy in any and all rooms.

Yeah the Lucero was not a good captain but her failures were the kinda things you would expect from a person new to a leadership field.

That's not to say Lucero isn't blameless. Your very right to point out changing his position on the project is wasting his time and talent. But at the same time I have no clue if he has a skill to contribute to the project they are working on. Admittedly not putting a biologist to useful work in a food crisis is a failure or administration.

Let's not forget Lucero did try to save Edward and he wouldnt listen to her.

[HumanXeroxMachine]

This episode sounds like a bad Star Trek fanfic.

All of Star Trek after Beyond is just bad Star Trek Fanfiction.

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Exhibit A for anyone who wants to argue that Star Trek writers have no idea what a leader is supposed to actually do.

What makes it worse is that it seems as if the audience is expected to take her side. I mean, Chuck's right that comedy is subjective, but there's a difference between dark humor and lazily mean-spirited.

[Hero_Of_Shadows]

First off I need to clarify my bias in this, the actress that plays the captain is really easy on the eyes for me, I personally would not have minded having her as a regular, given that I'm crushing Chuck's comment about highschool really hit home for me

Now there are certainly things she did wrong, she seemed to not have an idea what Edward was doing on the ship despite him being important enough to be called into the meeting where apparently the other people are department heads.

And re-assigning him to climatology of all things is the worst decision she could have made:

As it's been pointed out their emergency is food related and he's a biologist/protein expert he should at least be left in his field maybe even given more authority and resources given the food problem.

Even if his initial pitch had some ethical implications for which the captain shot it down.

The whole "we're scientists we learn new stuff all the time" reasoning is just so WTF I don't even know how to process it, I've worked in research labs with scientists and managers who work with those scientists no one thinks like that.

You know who does think like that ? Writers, they'll have a character be a biologist and then have them build lasers, hack computers, etc because "it's all science". People love to complain lately about the writing on every show but to me it does feel that with mystery boxes and etc there is less focus on tight believable world building.

Also her defense in her court martial is again just completely amateur level, but here we hit the issue that this is a comedy, if the short was "serious" it would probably have sounded differently.

Overall I agree that her performance as captain was lacking, but I think the talk of bumping her down to lt, kicking her out or her damaging the reputation of all female captains I read online when the episode was out are exaggerations.

This was supposed to be an "easier" first command to get her accustomed to being in command, but what actually happened was that she received a mad scientist among her crew.

About the titular Edward I am much less forgiving, his defense is basically the things I accused the captain of, the re-assignment etc, besides that he was just the worst and I don't want to defend his actions.

Yes Barclay was treated much better, given much more support and etc but Barclay was also on the flagship with a veteran captain, a counselor, with Guinan etc and Barclay was only messing with the holodeck in the episode he was introduced.

[Nealithi]

Yes Barclay was treated much better, given much more support and etc but Barclay was also on the flagship with a veteran captain, a counselor, with Guinan etc and Barclay was only messing with the holodeck in the episode he was introduced.

Just a thought. But was Barclay treated better till Guinan and Picard came around? He was transferred off his last ship for not 'fitting in' and Riker's initial thought was to toss him to another ship as well. Picard stopped that. When Geordi was at a loss, Guinan humanized the issue. Between this episode and Barclay's appearance it makes you wonder how 'good' most of Star Fleet really was.

[Link8909]

I’ve not seen this episode beyond this review because I live in the UK and it both has not been released to Netflix yet and I can’t get CBS all Access over here, and I don’t hate myself enough to look up clips on YouTube because that would mean I’d have to slog though the sorry, depressing state of affairs that is click-bait YouTube Channels.

But from what I’ve seen I can see how this is a polarising short and not just due to comedy being subjective as SFDebris said, I going to have to wait and see it in full to have an opinion about it, but I personally do appreciate this short because it is apart of Short Treks, which is all about experimentation with the Star Trek universe, and with that experimentation you do run the risk of the end result being a hit or miss.

[Nikas Zekeval]

Exhibit A for anyone who wants to argue that Star Trek writers have no idea what a leader is supposed to actually do.

What makes it worse is that it seems as if the audience is expected to take her side. I mean, Chuck's right that comedy is subjective, but there's a difference between dark humor and lazily mean-spirited.

Okay, I'm about to engage in armchair profiling, so take it for what it's worth.

I think Chuck hit the nail with a nuke when he described this as not a ship, but a hermetically sealed High School. I'm not sure if Edward was their idea of what Trekkies are like, but it certainly comes across that way.

The writers expected the audience to take their side, because this was how they saw it. All of them, the popular ones, "having do deal with" that "strange awkward kid in the corner" and the "adults" (Starfleet) demanding we have to include him on a group project.

And just like them in High School they had no idea, and less patience, for dealing with someone not as socially adroit and pleasing as them. And they expected Edward to be as loathed by the audience for his strange likes and hobbies, and no sympathy for his own trouble.

The whole "we're scientists we learn new stuff all the time" reasoning is just so WTF I don't even know how to process it, I've worked in research labs with scientists and managers who work with those scientists no one thinks like that.

You know who does think like that ? Writers, they'll have a character be a biologist and then have them build lasers, hack computers, etc because "it's all science". People love to complain lately about the writing on every show but to me it does feel that with mystery boxes and etc there is less focus on tight believable world building.

Someone else who thinks this way? Managers, this captain is Starfleet's "Pointy Haired Boss" from Dilbert. How many had a boss like that? Maybe another reason for the dislike for the captain, anyone who had a bad boss like this had at least an unconscious flashback to a boss that was petty, clueless, and given too much power.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

This shouldn't be titled Star Trek Discovery lol.

[PerrySimm]

Clearly one of those outings where "It's a TV show" sticks out too much. We crave internal consistency with our Trek. I'm not sure you can have "The Trouble with Tribbles" play out as a laugh if Tribbles are a Federation-made bioweapon.

If that fact was known to the Klingons, Kor would have levelled the station the moment the infestation was detected, treaty or no. The Enterprise sifts through the rubble and Spock and Bones manage to detect the virus the Klingons were adding to the grain; perhaps because it had spread to some of the crew after they salvage and use the content of a grain bin; 30-40 of the crew die from eating lunch at the wrong hour. Kirk goes chasing after the Klingons who give him a speech, and Kirk can't do anything about it. The episode ends not with a laugh, but with a somber Cold War, tit-for-tat, mutually-assured-destruction vibe.

[clearspira]

Clearly one of those outings where "It's a TV show" sticks out too much. We crave internal consistency with our Trek. I'm not sure you can have "The Trouble with Tribbles" play out as a laugh if Tribbles are a Federation-made bioweapon.

If that fact was known to the Klingons, Kor would have levelled the station the moment the infestation was detected, treaty or no. The Enterprise sifts through the rubble and Spock and Bones manage to detect the virus the Klingons were adding to the grain; perhaps because it had spread to some of the crew after they salvage and use the content of a grain bin; 30-40 of the crew die from eating lunch at the wrong hour. Kirk goes chasing after the Klingons who give him a speech, and Kirk can't do anything about it. The episode ends not with a laugh, but with a somber Cold War, tit-for-tat, mutually-assured-destruction vibe.

STD is hated by older fans for a reason. And the thing is, I know that I can be rightfully called a fanboy; getting hung up on things that don't really matter such as the crappy redesign of the 1701. And I admit that because the argument can be made that such things are unavoidable given the massive gap in SFX and budget since TOS. I get that. But things like this are irksome because they rewrite old stories in such a way that outright destroys them. Harry Mudd is the other catastrophe to come out of this for very similar reasons.