So, bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed Spock smashing bloodwine, and the general idea of the plot, decent Klingons etc. I did not enjoy unexplained spacewar drugs, feels like a very non-Star Trek thing.
That being said, I really wish they would stop harping the “do the thing do the thing” angle every time anyone sits in the Captain’s chair. It’s been in every show now and it’s just such a tired and stale joke that it’s moved over time from being funny, to tiring, to outright annoying.
+1 for the complaint on the ‘do the thing’ comment. I feel like it’s because engage/make it so have become somewhat of a meme from Picard in TNG and they’re looking to replicate that.
But the idea every captain has their thing is one seemingly from the new Treks. In the past series, engage is used frequently by Kirk, Janeway and Sisko. (Kirk also frequently uses warp speed Mr sulu, ahead warp factor 1, take her out, first star to the left and straight on till morning etc.) They’ve been really pushing ‘let’s fly’ from Discovery, but it’s a terrible line and trying to force it just makes it cringy. I wish they’d used that time to expand the stealing the Enterprise plot a little more.
The big problem with the joke here is it’s totally the wrong moment. They’ve disobeyed orders and “stolen” the enterprise but haven’t actually gotten away yet… don’t just sit there messing around!
I think this got things off to a reasonable start, but it doesn't feel like the strongest episode out of the gate. Maybe it's because the show deliberately chooses not take on the cliffhanger of the last season in the first episode. Starting the season with only part of the cast undertaking the mission I think also makes the episode feel a bit slight.
It's also a bit of a darker episode than the last season, but I'm not sure if engaging with the Klingon civil war aftermath is actually necessary in this episode. In fact, leaving out the Klingon stuff here would make it a bit less stodgy to me. I guess there is some curiosity as to what SNW characters were doing during the war, but it really feels like here, the only reason they framed this entire episode around the war was so that M'Benga and Chapel could juice themselves up with a substance that they never quite introduce before using it and Die Hard Klingons for a chunk of the episode. There's maybe some M'Benga trauma, but giving the character another trauma moment where some (particularly Ortegas) remain comparatively lightly characterized feels...meh.
It's probably all the Discovery elements, both in plot and in set design on screen, that make me feel this way, but I was hoping that Discovery would learn the best lessons from Strange New Worlds. This episode has me slightly worried that instead of that, Strange New Worlds may be learning some bad lessons from Discovery. That said I'm hoping things get better across the season. I thought this was good but just not quite what I wanted from the season opener.
I can’t seem to dm you for some reason (maybe because I’m registered on programming.dev?), but if you were interested I’d love to get startrekgifs running here with a clean start.
The M’Benga-and-Chapel-are-Max-Payne sequence went on far too long: only one group aboard the ship had weapons (and Stormtrooper accuracy) of any kind? I’d have preferred a stealthier sequence: after reprogramming the transponder, they use a series of Jeffries tubes to get to the airlock with the intent of opening it to escape but the ship takes off to ruin that plan.
Other than that, it was a decent episode to get the season going. Spock’s emotional journey will be a focal point of the season, which I’m okay with. SPECTRE The Broken Circle Gang is probably going to show up again and I wonder if we’ll eventually see some TOS villains retconned to be members. Carol Kane will be fun and with what was said of her species, I’m betting on her making at least two ENT references during the season.
Interesting that the false-flag ship is Crossfield-class: the saucer is a clear match but the drive section is completely different. Were the Discovery and Glenn modified from that spec to fit the spore drive research project or was the ship we saw a wartime refit of the class?
So Die Hard on a spaceship? We did that with Starship Mine already but I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Is Starfleet’s version of the Hippocratic oath “First, do no harm, unless you have to, in which case go hard.”?
As for the Crossfield-Class, I thought it might either be that the classification of Discovery made them change the format of it for obfuscation purposes. Either that or they built that ship from salvaged parts from the war, and the saucer/transponder was from a Crossfield, and Uhura was simply reading from the transponder code the ship class.
Fwiw, I am very happy to support the patreon but I don't feel great about it being attached to server perks. For some people $4/mo is nothing at all and for others it is genuinely significant. I don't want the Star Trek instance of all instances to be rewarding those who can afford to contribute financially.
That's a good point I hadn't considered, appreciate the insight. As long as we can pay the bills with what comes in, I suppose for now we'll just stick with what we've got.
Hooray, thank you! Fwiw, it is the donations model that is most common in FOSS projects (pay what/if you can) and I think it engenders a better sense of community, and I certainly feel more inclined to pay for something just so support it rather than because of any particular "perks" I might get, which are geeeenerally not really worth the money per se. I also would prefer your time to be spent on the actual server and not on having to integrate the various perks/linking accounts to patreon/etc etc.
The only perk we had in mind thus far was some user flair (whenever that inevitably gets invented). But you make a great point. Still getting used to this egalitarian perspective.
Maybe we could just reward people with ferengi themed flair for donating on patreon? Then all other types of flair could be kept unrelated to money or ferengis and be rewarded for stuff that doesn’t require money :P
lwaxana_katana, great point. I agree with you. It’s something I hadn’t thought about until you mentioned it. I’d rather see time and energy go to making startrek.website more and more awesome, rather than have something that differentiates the can donate from the can’t donate. Sometimes I have spare quatloos; sometimes I’m searching the couch cushion for quatloos. Startrek.website knows who donates. I think that’s good enough.
Sorry for not doing your name correctly. I’m still learning and not yet at the how to direct a comment at a particular person part of my learning curve.
Loved the episod! Ethan Peck owned it and now I can’t wait to see even more of Carol Kane’s character.
I am curious though, are the writers hinting at a future “Jekyll & Hyde” plot line when it comes to M’Benga and that green battle juice that he apparently keeps with himself at all times?
My thought is that his plotline this season might include some resolution of Klingon War era trauma, of which we’ve been told just a little bit in this episode, and which brings him to carry the super soldier serum on him.
This is great, I subbed. I am trying to setup a server dedicated to motorcycling (r/motorcycles etc). Really like that we can setup specialty sites. Usenet 2.0
That depends! You can run an instance on an old PC for just yourself and some friends for next to nothing, but a bigger instance with lots of traffic can easily climb to hundreds per month or more. No idea where we’ll end up when things slow down, but the subreddits this server represent currently have more users than the entire Lemmy-verse 😅
I’m just trying to get a rough idea of the order of magnitude. Has this instance exceeded “old PC” (For discussion’s sake, an 8 core i7-9700k with 32 gigabytes of RAM) yet?
Your definition of “old pc” is much nicer than mine. No we’re not there yet! But likely within the next few months. Lemmy.world recently made this post which you may find educational.
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