I think it's a stretch to interpret it as petty when it probably just gave Trip a bit of focus and let his 8 year old nephew shout like "that's my uncle!" or something. Real life astronauts get asked these questions all the time and they're practically deified in our culture.
I don't hate this. Seems like Skydance has less conflict of interest (i.e. alternative franchises) than the Warner Brothers merger talks from December. Remains to be seen if this is a good thing from a Trek point of view but... Could be worse.
Non-existent is probably hyperbole, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to feel that way after your kids have grown and you realize you never made the time to really focus on them. Even if you have a nominal relationship later, it’s as an adult, it’s only certain times a year, it’s focused on the grandkids etc.
I am about 80% through it as an audiobook (waiting for it to come back from the library) and I agree. Great to listen to him, tons of non Trek info I didn’t know that is still quite interesting.
Not the best husband to be sure, but I do like that he’s pretty up front about it. Seems like his first marriage was effectively over as soon as he found American success and his wife (understandably) didn’t want to abandon her own career in the UK. Hard to listen to Capt. Picard be unfaithful (with Vash no less!) but I felt for him more than most egomaniac rock stars who fuck anything that moves.
EDIT: Also loved how he hates Thatcher for demolishing all of the programs he used to get trained as an actor coming from a poor background. There was a lot of mutual aid in his early life that seems non-existent today.
All of the arguments I see for Discovery are based on representation and that’s literally the only thing the show got right. It’s like yeah, it’s great to have a diverse cast… I just wish they were on screen doing something good. Trek lives and dies in the writing, all the acting, effects, and out of universe concerns won’t save it from absolutely horrendous writing.
If they’d have done SNW style plots with DSC cast, it would have been amazing from the beginning.
As some have mentioned, this could be a/another backdoor pilot for Legacy where Seven more or less takes the torch from Picard, similar to Picard taking it from Kirk in Generations - although that was obviously after TNG instead of before.
I… Don’t hate this. He meets Kirk too, which could be captain wish fulfillment. After his nephew is killed in such a stupid way he just exits reality and never returns.
First Contact, like you said, is revenge on the Borg and saving Earth.
Insurrection is then him inventing the perfect woman to save and finding the fountain of youth.
Nemesis he fights an evil, young version of himself, which has gotta be worth a few years of therapy.
I’m not a huge fan of Discovery but I do hope we can get a balance between bold and new and the sort of nostalgia bait we’re in now. I mean, I love SNW, and it’s really filling out some canon gaps (love Uhura getting some real attention) but I really want to get away from cameos. They felt cheap in Disco S2 and they’re still cheap in SNW, but the writing is so much better it’s forgivable. PIC and LD are also very rooted in referencing old Trek. Hell, even Prodigy couldn’t resist making Janeway a (sort of) main character.
This is why I’m low key hyped about the Academy show, and am hoping it’s with Tilly in the far future. Give us Disco’s great, inclusive cast as peripheral characters, maybe even flesh them out more, but shift the focus to a class of cadets working as a team. Get back to that optimism and away from Burnham and whatever’s destroying the universe this season, without needing to root the show in old Trek.