🖖 #StarTrekDiscovery S02E04: A marked improvement over last week (no Klingons makes a big difference). Mysteries, science and technobabble, pissy fungus blobs, Number One, and reasons for no holograms on the Big E and (potentially) for no spore drive! Much better!
DIS
🖖 #StarTrekDiscovery S02E03: Meh. I’m all good with Tilly’s snarky space fungus, but all the Klingon stuff dragged. It was like this episode was half season two, half season one, and that wasn’t a good thing. My least favorite S2 episode so far. Fingers crossed for next week.
While I’m very glad the Klingons look more like Klingons and less like vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer this season, I have to admit to being amused that when they gave L’Rell hair, they entirely reshaped the back of her head. Looks like she lost about 1/4 of her skull. 🖖
Star Trek: Discovery S02E02: 👍
I really liked the extrapolation of Clarke’s Third Law; it was new to me, but WikiPedia says that particular variation is also known as Shermer’s Last Law.
Michael assuring Pike she wouldn’t make him laugh was the best line of the episode.
🖖
On Klingon Coiffures
Some semi-serious musing about Discovery season two:
Two things that we know at this point (not the only two things, just two things germane to this): season two starts immediately following season one, and every Klingon we’ve seen in the trailer, including L’Rell, now have their traditional (well, from TNG onward) long, flowing locks.
Which tells me one of three things: there’s a fairly substantial time jump sometime during season two, Klingon hair grows extremely quickly, or the Discovery producers were so intent on satisfying this particular aspect of fanwank that they didn’t think about that aspect.
Or, I suppose, the Klingon market for hair weaves suddenly exploded.
Linkdump for October 2nd through November 9th
Sometime between October 2nd and November 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- ‘Star Trek: Short Treks’ Michael Chabon, Aldis Hodge Interview [SPOILERS]: “I started thinking about The Odyssey and the story of Odysseus landing on the Isle of Calypso,” Chabon tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He’s been out wandering for a long time, and she takes him in and falls in love with him. He’s been traumatized and is now just trying to get home, but has this strange magical interlude on the way.”
- “In political terms, calling something a ‘distraction’ means it’s a distraction tactic, not that the issue itself isn’t important.”: “The Republican party has a very longstanding history of dropping hints of major policy changes right before big elections in the hopes of getting the ‘hot-headed liberals’ all fired up about it so we start bickering among ourselves.”
- What Makes ‘The Good Place’ So Good?: “NBC gave Michael Schur total freedom. So the TV impresario made a sitcom that’s also a profound work of philosophy.” This show is so very good. My dad would have loved it.
- “Fifty years later and this is still one of the most daring filmmaking decisions I’ve ever seen on TV”: Behind-the-scenes info on the shooting of the scene in Amok Time where Spock breaks down. One single shot, 1:45, no cuts — done in a single take, at Leonard Nimoy’s insistence.
- Woman awarded Nobel Prize in physics for first time in 55 years: “Donna Strickland, from Canada, is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963.”
TrekMovie has an analysis of the #StarTrek #Discovery promo video posted today, including stills of DIS’s take on the TOS uniforms. I think I like the blend of TOS and DIS styles they came up with. Here’s hoping season two is a bit more to my liking than season one was. 🖖
Nice collection of renders of the DIS version of the Enterprise collected by TrekMovie. Gotta admit, I think this version of the ship is growing on me, and these artists’ work presenting it from different angles helps.
Linkdump for April 15th through April 18th
Sometime between April 15th and April 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift: “There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.”
- Discovery Needs to Put Section 31 Down and Back Away Slowly: "Section 31 literally destroys the the idea of a better tomorrow, which is the very backbone of Star Trek. Because, if Section 31 is real then tomorrow is way worse than today. I refuse to believe that."
- ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ USS Enterprise Design Change Clarified As Creative Decision, Not A Legal One: Correction regarding a link I posted earlier in the week that said there were legal reasons for the Enterprise design changes: "CBS TV Studios does, in fact, have the right to use the U.S.S. Enterprise ship design from the past TV series, and are not legally required to make changes. The changes in the ship design were creative ones, made to utilize 2018’s VFX technology."
- Woman Who Shared Philadelphia Starbucks Arrest Video Tells Her Story: “People ignore this kind of stuff. They don’t believe that it happens. People are saying that there must be more to this story. There is not. This would never happen to someone who looks like me. People don’t believe black people when they say this stuff happens. It does. They want to know the extenuating circumstances. There are none.”
- Star Trek: Discovery’s Version of the Enterprise Had to Be Modified for Legal Reasons: Interesting tidbit of information. While Discovery’s been a bit hit-and-miss for me, I’ll admit that in the moment, the end-of-season reveal did just what it was intended to do. I’m not too put off by the design changes to the Enterprise, either; it was a given that it wouldn’t be identical, and I thought they did a reasonably good job of staying true to the classic form while updating it for modern needs (and a much better job than the oddly lumpy NuTrek version).
Dealing with ST:DIS/TOS discrepancies
Something for the Trek fans in my circles who either are watching Discovery or don’t mind spoilery stuff: I’ve just finished reading Desperate Hours, the first DIS tie-in novel. It’s set a year before the opening of DIS and a year after Pike’s Enterprise visits Talos IV (as seen in “The Cage”), and involves both the Shenzhou and the Enterprise under Captain Pike’s command. As such, it has to find a way to address some of the more obvious differences between the shows, and it doesn’t do a bad job, with some attempts at explanation, and some simple knowing wink-and-nod acknowledgements.
It’s also worth noting that according to the people behind DIS’s media tie-ins, this and any forthcoming DIS books and comics can be considered canon unless the show contradicts it.
Here are a few key things I noticed. Obviously, spoilers from here on down (though I’m trying to avoid spoilers for the actual plot of the book, and am concentrating just on the areas where the old and new overlap)…
p. 79:
Unlike many other types of starship in the fleet, Constitution-class vessels had no ready rooms for their captains. Most days, Pike didn’t miss having a ready room—except for those occasions when he received a classified transmission above the security clearance of his bridge crew, compelling him to return to his quarters to receive it.
p. 93:
In Georgiou’s experience, it was a bad idea for the captain to appear distracted on the bridge…. Thus had Starfleet adopted the tradition of a captain’s “ready room.” Though not all ships of the line had incorporated the concept, many had, and they were proving to be increasingly popular with commanding officers throughout the service. Georgiou was one of them.
p. 97:
In front of the bridge’s forward view of Sirsa III appeared a life-sized hologram of the commanding officer of the Enterprise. A grave expression darkened the human man’s youthful, chiseled features. “Captain Georgiou. I’m Captain Christopher Pike.”
So by this passage and others in the book, the Enterprise does have the holographic communications interface.
p. 97-98:
Responsibility for monitoring the wider theater of operations was actually the duty of Narwani, the junior tactical officer, whose head was encased in a gleaming metallic VR helmet designed for that task.
That’s the “Daft Punk” robot-looking character seen on the Shenzhou — not a robot, but an officer in a VR helmet.
p. 106:
Burnham had known Lieutenant Spock when they both were children, but it had been many years since they had seen or even spoken to each other in passing.”
The first mention of Burnham and Spock encountering each other in their youth.
p. 111:
“Time for full disclosure, Mister Spock. Who is the Shenzhou’s XO to you?”
“Her name is Michael Burnham,” Spock said. “She is…a friend of my family.”
Pike was confused. “How well do you know her?”
“She is a few years older than I am, so we rarely moved in the same social or academic circles. If not for her connection to my parents, I would barely know of her at all.”
So Burnham is slightly older than Spock. Also, this is one of Spock’s “technically not lying” statements.
p. 117:
A golden shimmer and a mellifluous droning washed away the familiar grey confines of the Enterprise’s transporter room and delivered Spock to its counterpart inside the Shenzhou. He noticed immediately that the two compartments were laid out very differently. Whereas the Enterprise’s transporter room consisted of a dias with six energizer pads in front of the console, on the Shenzhou the energizer pads were larger and mounted on a curved bulkhead behind a semicircular dais. Also of note to Spock was the darker ambience of the Shenzhou’s transporter room and its more spacious nature.
p. 118:
He fell in at her side as they left the transporter room and strolled the corridors of the Shenzhou. Once again Spock noted marked differences in the interior of the Walker-class ship from that of the Enterprise. Aboard the Shenzhou the grays were darker, and the bulkheads’ orientations more angular. It was clear to him that the two ships had been designed and constructed in different eras, according to very different aesthetic standards. Such drastic changes in a short span of time were not unusual among the humans of Earth, though it had proved a constant source of bemusement among their Vulcan and Andorian allies.
p. 119:
The doors closed, and the lift car shot into motion with hardly any sensation of movement. Spock noted the profusion of display screens that ringed the top of the lift car, and the complexity of the interface screens placed at eye level. He preferred the austerity of the Enterprise’s turbolifts, with their dearth of distractions and an optional control handle.
p. 145:
He stood at attention while he waited for the golden scintillation of the beam to resolve into the familiar shape of a humanoid female wearing a pale beige turtleneck tunic, black trousers, tall boots, and a small backpack.
First mention of the differences in uniform styles.
p. 157:
Gant and his team from the Shenzhou wore dark blue Starfleet utility jumpsuit uniforms with black trim, while the Enterprise team members sported pale gold or light blue jerseys over black trousers—a new uniform style that so far had been issued exclusively to the crews of Starfleet’s vaunted Constitution-class starships.
p. 273:
“What if we devised an automated delivery system, such as a drone, to deliver the gas?”
“If it’s remote controlled,” Gant said, “the command system would be crippled by the same scrambling field that’s blocking our transporters. And as I’m sure you recall, autonomous robotic attack systems—”
“Are prohibited by Federation law,” Saru said, finishing the citation. “A most nettlesome restriction, if you ask me.”
Ensign Fan turned away from the communications console. “That’s what the people of Earth used to think, right up until World War III. Every time I think about those killer ‘bots in the streets of Paris, I get a shiver down my spine.”
Interesting bit of in-universe history.
p. 330:
Gant pressed his index finger to his panel’s firing control. Outside the center viewport, a fierce storm of energy pulses erupted from the Shenzhou’s numerous phaser batteries. the barrage tore holes in the Juggernaut’s shields, which crackled into view like a tattered bubble of sickly green light. Then a pair of steady blue beams from the Enterprise pierced the green cocoon, sliced into the goliath, and flensed off large pieces of its hull.
The fearsome power of the Constitution-class starship’s state-of-the-art weaponry drew a gasp from Oliveira. “My God,” she said. “The new type-ten phaser banks can do that?”
“And a lot more,” Georgiou said, succumbing to a small twinge of envy.
p. 352:
Blue-shirted medical crewmen from the Enterprise parted from their white-uniformed counterparts from the Shenzhou….
p. 356:
“You seem different since you got back.”
Her assertion aroused Spock’s curiosity. “In what regard?”
“You seem…I don’t know. Older? No—calmer than you did before.” She tilted her head as she continued to study him and collect her thoughts. “You present yourself in a way that feels more centered. Better balanced.” Her smile broadened to a grin. “You have gravitas now.”
Recognizing the difference in Nimoy’s portrayal of Spock between “The Cage” and later episodes.
So that’s it. I enjoyed the book, and the nods to trying to explain — or at least recognize and maybe rationalize a bit — the differences between two series set only a decade apart, but produced half a century apart, were a lot of fun.