Soldato
3x03 - People Of Earth
re: music overpowering the on-screen action
One of the many reasons for me why Wrath Of Khan works so well, not just as a Star Trek film but as a film? The soundtrack knows when to shut the **** up.
Take that scene on the Regula planetoid. David has taken McCoy and Saavik off to show them the Genesis cave, Chekov is unconscious and laid out recovering, Kirk is alone with Carol and in an atypically restrained way pours his heart out about the situation they're all in, about David, about how he feels utterly worn out. And there's no background music. It's just a man, sat despondently picking over some of his life choices. Later on in the Mutara nebula, Enterprise and Reliant have a fairly equal exchange of fire and are left hunting each other once more. And again the music goes away, you're just left with the bridge noise when the action goes inside and the static discharge sounds when it's a VFX shot and it all builds incredible tension. The music doesn't come back until Enterprise averts 2D space, ducks down and comes back up right behind Reliant to pound the snot out of her.
1) Wholly unnecessary recap.
2) If this episode has the Discoball all completely pristine and not at all looking like a ship that fought a pitched space battle, shot through a time hole, crashed into a planet and got half-crushed by ice then I shall be...entirely unsurprised.
3) I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do show it beat to hell, though.
4) Technically a flashback now, since this is from before the Discoball arriving.
5) Dilithium supplies 'dried up'. Um...have the writers forgotten that TNG showed dilithium being recrystallised? I guess we could say that there's a finite limit to how many times you can do that, but it was never mentioned before.
6) And then the mysterious 'Burn'.
7) Dilithium goes inert, matter and antimatter mix uncontrollably, fair enough. But some dilithium survived in usable condition, yeah? And sure, it takes Starfleet out...and the Klingon DSF...and whatever other space fleets were active in the galaxy at the time...but the Federation could still fall like that? When FTL communications are still a thing? Do me a lemon...
8) Well, here's where the ripping off of Andromeda starts in earnest.
9) God, she's heroic
10) Bored already.
11) Pretty VFX though.
12) The cat is still the brains of the business.
13) Well, thank God she was interrupted...
14) Glomped by Tilly, and welcomed by some of the crew.
15) Oh good, she's sobbing again. Because that's certainly a range where SMG's acting isn't at all lousy...no, wait, sorry, that's wrong.
16) Ship corridor looking suspiciously well-maintained given the events I listed in 2).
17) So, did they change the timeline or did Bonehead's momma lie to her? Oooh, please tell me that Gabrielle Burnham is going to be the one responsible for the Burn and it's going to be up to Bonehead to stop her...
18) Foreshadowing. And once again, subtlety is not STD's forté.
19) Michael giving the bridge crew a quick rundown on the miniscule amount that she's learned about the Burn in a year (so much for her being The Messiah, One True Light, Famed In Song And Story eh?). Bridge looking remarkably intact given the events I listed in...oh, bugger it. Let's just come out and say it - yet again a ship in Star Trek is magically fixed and up-and-running after events that should have reduced it to a fine mist. Voyager used to do this all the bloody time.
20) For once, !Georgiou actually making a decent point - the spore drive really does cross the border into impossibility even in a franchise that has FTL travel and comms, teleporters, the occasional honourable politician and Q.
21) Detmer shedding tears for the dead. But not quite as wigged out as last week.
22) A 12 year old transmission from Earth. Yeah, not at all sounding like a trap
23) Jump to a point outside Earth's scanning range. A sensible plan. So...d'you happen to know what Earth's scanning range is these days Michael?
24) Who writes this absolute dreck, sits back and thinks "yeah, did a good job there"?
25) Stamets not sure who's in charge.
26) Saru, then.
27) But we've got to pause for another 'inspirational' Burnham speech that doesn't at all make me want to strangle myself to escape.
28) Nine minutes of that rubbish before we got to the intro. Nine. Jesus ******* Christ.
29) Back to *ahem* borrowing from Star Wars with the repair robots out working on the hull.
30) Memorial wall. Is it just me, or did the Discoball crew never really strike you as a 'band of brothers' right up until the story desperately needed them to be at the end of last season?
31) On the plus side, they're at least paying lip service to the emotional weight of leaving everyone behind in 2258 (which I'll again point out was wholly unnecessary since Control had been defeated. And if they really wanted the sphere data gone they could have just detonated an antimatter bomb in the middle of the Disco's engine room, watched the fireworks and then gone out for dinner in the mess hall of the USS Discoball NCC 1031-A).
32) *hums Careless Whisper to himself*
33) Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored.
34) Bored.
35) Which idiot let !Georgiou loose near a transporter?
36) Witless dialogue between her and Book.
37) So, I know the Discoball was a research ship in the 2250s and had to carry a bunch of dilithium for that purpose...but the writers had to remember about this thing called The Original Series set in 2265-69 where dilithium was quite rare and precious, right?
38) Continuing witless dialogue, this time between Book and Burnham.
39) Impressively accurate use of '********' for a US series, though. Credit where it's due.
40) Burnham and Saru now holding the 'witless dialogue' ball.
41) Bored.
42) It's come to something when the most broken thing seen aboard the Discoball after everything she went through is that table in the foreground. Well, that and the crew. They're all entirely broken and have been since the start of this Godforsaken series...
43) Book walks onto bridge, female bridge crew immediately horny.
44) Go go gadget mushroom drive.
45) Saturn.
46) Book is easily impressed.
47) Hang on, they jumped to the outskirts of Saturn's orbit...but they got into visual range of Earth within the span of a brief conversation?
48) Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale, part ∞.
49) VFX team go to work again.
50) [Ackbar]It's a trap![/Ackbar]
51) Snotty attitude from the new arrival with her opening sentence. Might not be a record breaker for this series, but possibly ties her with others.
52) United Earth Defence Force. So, the United Earth was the government of Earth and her colonies (the lunar and Martian colonies, Jupiter station, Titan, Proxima, Deneva, Vega and Terra Nova) before the Federation was formed after the Earth-Romulan war. Raising more questions about the fall of the Federation to be honest, so I'm pausing to dive in.
Any time we saw Federation politics on-screen before, Earth was the centre of it all. It was all ran from offices in Paris, with Starfleet in San Francisco. We know FTL communications survived the Burn because anything that prevents you having subspace comms prevents you from having subspace sensors, and thus the few ships that have enough dilithium scrounged for them wouldn't actually be able to navigate. So real-time communications within the Solar System have to be perfectly possible. But how far out do you have to go before it's no longer an acceptable delay?
In TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before" Data gives us enough information to work out the speed of subspace communications. It comes out at a pretty fantastical speed - warp factor 9.995 on TNG's scale, or wf 37.35 (!) for TOS. Now, you'd need subspace relay beacons all over the shop to make use of this communications speed. And there are going to be lots of bits of space where it just isn't a runner (too near a quasar, a stellar nursery in the way, areas with large amounts of subspace interference). But for, say, Earth to Proxima you've got effectively real-time communications. Similar for Vulcan, which orbits 40 Eridani A ~17 light years from Earth - the delay at wf 37.35, i.e. 52104.1C, isn't even three hours. It would take a starship days to do that distance, weird time skip in the first JJTrek film notwithstanding - Scotty claims in TMP that the newly refitted Enterprise NCC 1701 can do the trip from Earth in four days, TNG era and later ships would obviously shave some time off that but they're not going to get it down to less than the time it would take a subspace message to get there. It's going to be a similar story for Andor and Tellar (two of the other founding member worlds of the Federation).
D'you see what I'm getting at? For the opening few hundred years of the Federation being a thing (i.e. the portions of galactic history shown in Trek from ENT to PIC), subspace FTL comms once they existed were a lot faster than ships. And yet, the Federation flourished and prospered even without having ships that could get from member world to member world within hours. I guess we could say that the Federation grew to be so sprawling that no longer having ships to patrol it/move goods around it/get ambassadors to places where they could pee off the most people badly hurt it. But to wipe it out? I just don't buy the premise, and that's unfortunate given that it apparently underpins this whole series now.
Rant over. For the moment.
53) Oh dear. Quoting regulations. We've got ourselves a bureaucrat.
54) Saru's first day as official captain is off to a great start.
55) Yes, unfortunately for Saru this bureaucrat has a keen BS detector.
56) Charming bunch, this Earth lot.
57) If this had been Kirk's Enterprise, that boarding party would be laid out by now with a combination of Kirk-fu, phaser fire and The Famous Spock Nerve Pinch™
Instead, this crew look on gormlessly as their ship gets taken over.
58) Burnham with her first good idea of the entire series so far - get her and Book into uniforms so they don't stand out to the boarding party. One good idea, and we're 32 episodes in. **** me sideways...
59) Book talking about an adventure not seen on-screen. Because it's not at all annoying when a series does that to fill in some screentime without actually showing anything of note on-screen.
60) "hums Careless Whisper to himself again*
61) Someone please make this dialogue end.
62) Oh, no. That's much worse. Now it's Burnham and !Georgiou.
63) Are you ready?
64) Here it comes.
65) The only thing that keeps me going through these commentaries.
66) Three..
67) ...two...
68) ...one...
69) Nice
70) SEX POSITION JOKE WOOOOOOOOOOO.
71) *ahem* Sorry about that. But making a '69' comment is always the highlight of these for me.
72) Though it wouldn't be hard for that to be a highlight given the quality of the writing and dialogue here. I'm looking at my desk, seriously considering stabbing myself in the hand with a pen. At least then my physical discomfort will match my annoyance level.
73) Bureaucrat has hold of the exposition ball.
74) Hang on, dilithium raiders went after Earth? Earth has no natural dilithium deposits in Trek. It's all mined from other worlds or planetary bodies. Just how much dilithium would be stored at Earth? The major ship building yards are at Mars (Utopia Planitia), the Antares yard where the Defiant (or the USS Ben Sisko's Mother ******* Pimp Hand, to use her proper title) was built and several others. Final fit might be done in Earth orbit as with the Enterprise refit, but Starfleet quit building ships at Earth after the initial builds of the Consitution class.
75) Someone challenging for the SMG Bad Emotional Acting™ award (***edit*** Phumzile Sitole, apparently she was in "Orange Is the New Black" and "The Good Fight". Either she's wildly miscast here, or she's just not very good. I know the material isn't great but it's possible to elevate mediocre writing, look at Patrick Stewart and some of the shonkier bits of TNG and Picard.)
76) So this Wen that she's blathering on about - the story is going all-in on painting him as a bad guy, so I'm going to save myself some time by assuming that he's not and that this is Yet Another Cack-handed Plot Twist™ coming
77) Timeline update - the Federation and Starfleet haven't been on Earth for 100 years.
78) Politics update - Earth seceded from the Federation and can protect itself. Can you call it subtext when it's like this, or is it just text?
79) Those who hated STP's riffing on current political events are going to loooooooooooove this.
80) Admiral Senna Tal is reported as dead...so he won't be.
81) Meanwhile in the engine room, Stamets trying to keep the intruders from clattering into anything sensitive.
82) Snark-to-snark combat between Tilly and the youngest of the Earth defence force peeps. Who is apparently 16. Getting lots of lines, so I think this is one of the new non-binary characters - Adira.
83) And we're back to red alert. How...dull.
84) Standard Trek scene of everyone piling back onto the bridge.
85) So the lady who Saru relieved at the conn is Lt. Nilsson. Nilsson replaced Airiam as the bridge spore drive ops officer and is played by Sara Mitich...who played Airiam in Season 1 before being replaced in the role by Hannah Cheesman for S2.
86) Another character who can outsmart the Discoball crew. Not that it's much of an achievement, mind.
87) Bureaucrat wants to leave and can't. So that's at least slightly amusing.
88) Accuses the Disco crew of sabotage, because she's about as intelligent as Burnham.
89) Burnham has another plan. I wonder if it sucks? I bet it sucks.
90) Woohoo, yet another plot hole brought to you by the writing staff of STD and their utter failure to consider what came before! A (minor) plot point in the wonderful TNG episode "Relics" was that Scotty hadn't come across synthehol before - Data had to explain what it was, and then go find a real drink from Guinan's private stash under the bar (which turned out to be a bottle of Aldebaran whiskey that Picard had gotten her).
Scotty went into the pattern buffer in 2294. The Discoball came from 2258. So why would he be unaware of the existence of synthehol if it was around back when he was in Starfleet?
D'oh!
HELLOOOOOOO, EARTH TO STD WRITERS, DID ANYONE THINK TO SANITY-CHECK THEIR WORK?!?!?!
91) Burnham going with the whole 'seek forgiveness rather than ask permission' route. Just what Saru is going to need in an executive officer...
92) Back in the engine room, Stamets and Tilly digging into what's stopping the Earth defence force crew from beaming out. And it's not their tech, so it must be Adira since they were the only one with meaningful lines in the script earlier.
93) Stamets and Tilly agree with me.
94) I expect that was supposed to be witty. It really wasn't.
95) VFX team get to shine again briefly.
96) For those of you at 89) who bet against Burnham's plan sucking...you lose. How much did you bet?
97) Over to Book's ship, and two people being out-acted by a cat. Again.
98) Quantum torpedoes still exist then.
99) "Fire torpedoes in thirty seconds." Unnecessary countdowns brought to you by the bureaucrat.
100) God, there's more than ten minutes of this rubbish left.
101) Detmer attempting to be a voice of reason. Saru going with stupidly noble instead. Remember what quantum torpedoes used to do to ships in DS9? The Discoball is going to find out.
102) Sorry, Burnham has never let you down??? Really????
103) Welp, and they'd just got that bridge tidy this morning. I do hope no-one had to die for Burnham's dumb plan.
104) Oh, okay. So they're either beaming a bomb onto Wen's ship (which would be bloodthirsty even for Burnham) or beaming Wen off.
105) Beamed him off.
106) This is all completely stupid and terrible and I hate it.
107) !Georgiou losing patience with the whole bag of mashings. Much as I despise the character (and I do, genuinely, despise how they write !Georgiou), that was an amusing moment.
108) Those of you who couldn't guess that Wen was human under that helmet need to subject yourselves to Seasons 1 & 2 again, remind yourself how this series cannot do plot twists without telegraphing them light years in advance.
109) Back with Adira, as they do their little hacking mission.
110) Stamets calling them out.
111) "There's no-one like me." What, smug, blonde-haired gits with a wild superiority complex? Sure, Stamets. Okay
112) On the plus side, he's learned more in three minutes than Burnham would have managed in three months.
113) Exposition.
114) Yeah. Okay. Sure. Earth and Titan have been at odds with each other for ages, but the Discoball rocks up, gets them talking and everything is solved.
115) Soundtrack trying to use the Courage fanfare as if this isn't poorly-written arse gravy.
116) Adira joining the Discoball crew, because a ship that regularly gets the crap kicked out of it is the perfect environment for a 16 year old.
117) Adira is Tal. Calling it.
118) Called it. Though some advances must have been made, because when Riker had a Trill symbiont stuffed into him to save its life the joining couldn't happen for long.
119) Saru calling Burnham out for not informing him about her sucky plan that almost got the Discoball blown to Narnia by a couple of quantum torpedoes.
120) I'd call this exposition, if it was actually saying anything remotely interesting.
121) Book and Burnham parting ways for now. So, are they going to ride to his rescue in a later episode or is he going to ride to theirs?
122) I'm going to miss the cat, though. The cat was cool.
123) This is supposed to be heartwarming, and all I feel is a burning hatred for the writers.
124) Courage fanfare again, as we shoot past the San Fran landmarks.
125) "Next time..." Looks like they're off to get Adira's Trill link sorted.
2) If this episode has the Discoball all completely pristine and not at all looking like a ship that fought a pitched space battle, shot through a time hole, crashed into a planet and got half-crushed by ice then I shall be...entirely unsurprised.
3) I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do show it beat to hell, though.
4) Technically a flashback now, since this is from before the Discoball arriving.
5) Dilithium supplies 'dried up'. Um...have the writers forgotten that TNG showed dilithium being recrystallised? I guess we could say that there's a finite limit to how many times you can do that, but it was never mentioned before.
6) And then the mysterious 'Burn'.
7) Dilithium goes inert, matter and antimatter mix uncontrollably, fair enough. But some dilithium survived in usable condition, yeah? And sure, it takes Starfleet out...and the Klingon DSF...and whatever other space fleets were active in the galaxy at the time...but the Federation could still fall like that? When FTL communications are still a thing? Do me a lemon...
8) Well, here's where the ripping off of Andromeda starts in earnest.
9) God, she's heroic
10) Bored already.
11) Pretty VFX though.
12) The cat is still the brains of the business.
13) Well, thank God she was interrupted...
14) Glomped by Tilly, and welcomed by some of the crew.
15) Oh good, she's sobbing again. Because that's certainly a range where SMG's acting isn't at all lousy...no, wait, sorry, that's wrong.
16) Ship corridor looking suspiciously well-maintained given the events I listed in 2).
17) So, did they change the timeline or did Bonehead's momma lie to her? Oooh, please tell me that Gabrielle Burnham is going to be the one responsible for the Burn and it's going to be up to Bonehead to stop her...
18) Foreshadowing. And once again, subtlety is not STD's forté.
19) Michael giving the bridge crew a quick rundown on the miniscule amount that she's learned about the Burn in a year (so much for her being The Messiah, One True Light, Famed In Song And Story eh?). Bridge looking remarkably intact given the events I listed in...oh, bugger it. Let's just come out and say it - yet again a ship in Star Trek is magically fixed and up-and-running after events that should have reduced it to a fine mist. Voyager used to do this all the bloody time.
20) For once, !Georgiou actually making a decent point - the spore drive really does cross the border into impossibility even in a franchise that has FTL travel and comms, teleporters, the occasional honourable politician and Q.
21) Detmer shedding tears for the dead. But not quite as wigged out as last week.
22) A 12 year old transmission from Earth. Yeah, not at all sounding like a trap
23) Jump to a point outside Earth's scanning range. A sensible plan. So...d'you happen to know what Earth's scanning range is these days Michael?
24) Who writes this absolute dreck, sits back and thinks "yeah, did a good job there"?
25) Stamets not sure who's in charge.
26) Saru, then.
27) But we've got to pause for another 'inspirational' Burnham speech that doesn't at all make me want to strangle myself to escape.
28) Nine minutes of that rubbish before we got to the intro. Nine. Jesus ******* Christ.
29) Back to *ahem* borrowing from Star Wars with the repair robots out working on the hull.
30) Memorial wall. Is it just me, or did the Discoball crew never really strike you as a 'band of brothers' right up until the story desperately needed them to be at the end of last season?
31) On the plus side, they're at least paying lip service to the emotional weight of leaving everyone behind in 2258 (which I'll again point out was wholly unnecessary since Control had been defeated. And if they really wanted the sphere data gone they could have just detonated an antimatter bomb in the middle of the Disco's engine room, watched the fireworks and then gone out for dinner in the mess hall of the USS Discoball NCC 1031-A).
32) *hums Careless Whisper to himself*
33) Bored. Bored. Bored. Bored.
34) Bored.
35) Which idiot let !Georgiou loose near a transporter?
36) Witless dialogue between her and Book.
37) So, I know the Discoball was a research ship in the 2250s and had to carry a bunch of dilithium for that purpose...but the writers had to remember about this thing called The Original Series set in 2265-69 where dilithium was quite rare and precious, right?
38) Continuing witless dialogue, this time between Book and Burnham.
39) Impressively accurate use of '********' for a US series, though. Credit where it's due.
40) Burnham and Saru now holding the 'witless dialogue' ball.
41) Bored.
42) It's come to something when the most broken thing seen aboard the Discoball after everything she went through is that table in the foreground. Well, that and the crew. They're all entirely broken and have been since the start of this Godforsaken series...
43) Book walks onto bridge, female bridge crew immediately horny.
44) Go go gadget mushroom drive.
45) Saturn.
46) Book is easily impressed.
47) Hang on, they jumped to the outskirts of Saturn's orbit...but they got into visual range of Earth within the span of a brief conversation?
48) Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale, part ∞.
49) VFX team go to work again.
50) [Ackbar]It's a trap![/Ackbar]
51) Snotty attitude from the new arrival with her opening sentence. Might not be a record breaker for this series, but possibly ties her with others.
52) United Earth Defence Force. So, the United Earth was the government of Earth and her colonies (the lunar and Martian colonies, Jupiter station, Titan, Proxima, Deneva, Vega and Terra Nova) before the Federation was formed after the Earth-Romulan war. Raising more questions about the fall of the Federation to be honest, so I'm pausing to dive in.
Any time we saw Federation politics on-screen before, Earth was the centre of it all. It was all ran from offices in Paris, with Starfleet in San Francisco. We know FTL communications survived the Burn because anything that prevents you having subspace comms prevents you from having subspace sensors, and thus the few ships that have enough dilithium scrounged for them wouldn't actually be able to navigate. So real-time communications within the Solar System have to be perfectly possible. But how far out do you have to go before it's no longer an acceptable delay?
In TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before" Data gives us enough information to work out the speed of subspace communications. It comes out at a pretty fantastical speed - warp factor 9.995 on TNG's scale, or wf 37.35 (!) for TOS. Now, you'd need subspace relay beacons all over the shop to make use of this communications speed. And there are going to be lots of bits of space where it just isn't a runner (too near a quasar, a stellar nursery in the way, areas with large amounts of subspace interference). But for, say, Earth to Proxima you've got effectively real-time communications. Similar for Vulcan, which orbits 40 Eridani A ~17 light years from Earth - the delay at wf 37.35, i.e. 52104.1C, isn't even three hours. It would take a starship days to do that distance, weird time skip in the first JJTrek film notwithstanding - Scotty claims in TMP that the newly refitted Enterprise NCC 1701 can do the trip from Earth in four days, TNG era and later ships would obviously shave some time off that but they're not going to get it down to less than the time it would take a subspace message to get there. It's going to be a similar story for Andor and Tellar (two of the other founding member worlds of the Federation).
D'you see what I'm getting at? For the opening few hundred years of the Federation being a thing (i.e. the portions of galactic history shown in Trek from ENT to PIC), subspace FTL comms once they existed were a lot faster than ships. And yet, the Federation flourished and prospered even without having ships that could get from member world to member world within hours. I guess we could say that the Federation grew to be so sprawling that no longer having ships to patrol it/move goods around it/get ambassadors to places where they could pee off the most people badly hurt it. But to wipe it out? I just don't buy the premise, and that's unfortunate given that it apparently underpins this whole series now.
Rant over. For the moment.
53) Oh dear. Quoting regulations. We've got ourselves a bureaucrat.
54) Saru's first day as official captain is off to a great start.
55) Yes, unfortunately for Saru this bureaucrat has a keen BS detector.
56) Charming bunch, this Earth lot.
57) If this had been Kirk's Enterprise, that boarding party would be laid out by now with a combination of Kirk-fu, phaser fire and The Famous Spock Nerve Pinch™
Instead, this crew look on gormlessly as their ship gets taken over.58) Burnham with her first good idea of the entire series so far - get her and Book into uniforms so they don't stand out to the boarding party. One good idea, and we're 32 episodes in. **** me sideways...
59) Book talking about an adventure not seen on-screen. Because it's not at all annoying when a series does that to fill in some screentime without actually showing anything of note on-screen.
60) "hums Careless Whisper to himself again*
61) Someone please make this dialogue end.
62) Oh, no. That's much worse. Now it's Burnham and !Georgiou.
63) Are you ready?
64) Here it comes.
65) The only thing that keeps me going through these commentaries.
66) Three..
67) ...two...
68) ...one...
69) Nice
70) SEX POSITION JOKE WOOOOOOOOOOO.
71) *ahem* Sorry about that. But making a '69' comment is always the highlight of these for me.
72) Though it wouldn't be hard for that to be a highlight given the quality of the writing and dialogue here. I'm looking at my desk, seriously considering stabbing myself in the hand with a pen. At least then my physical discomfort will match my annoyance level.
73) Bureaucrat has hold of the exposition ball.
74) Hang on, dilithium raiders went after Earth? Earth has no natural dilithium deposits in Trek. It's all mined from other worlds or planetary bodies. Just how much dilithium would be stored at Earth? The major ship building yards are at Mars (Utopia Planitia), the Antares yard where the Defiant (or the USS Ben Sisko's Mother ******* Pimp Hand, to use her proper title
) was built and several others. Final fit might be done in Earth orbit as with the Enterprise refit, but Starfleet quit building ships at Earth after the initial builds of the Consitution class.75) Someone challenging for the SMG Bad Emotional Acting™ award (***edit*** Phumzile Sitole, apparently she was in "Orange Is the New Black" and "The Good Fight". Either she's wildly miscast here, or she's just not very good. I know the material isn't great but it's possible to elevate mediocre writing, look at Patrick Stewart and some of the shonkier bits of TNG and Picard.)
76) So this Wen that she's blathering on about - the story is going all-in on painting him as a bad guy, so I'm going to save myself some time by assuming that he's not and that this is Yet Another Cack-handed Plot Twist™ coming
77) Timeline update - the Federation and Starfleet haven't been on Earth for 100 years.
78) Politics update - Earth seceded from the Federation and can protect itself. Can you call it subtext when it's like this, or is it just text?
79) Those who hated STP's riffing on current political events are going to loooooooooooove this.
80) Admiral Senna Tal is reported as dead...so he won't be.
81) Meanwhile in the engine room, Stamets trying to keep the intruders from clattering into anything sensitive.
82) Snark-to-snark combat between Tilly and the youngest of the Earth defence force peeps. Who is apparently 16. Getting lots of lines, so I think this is one of the new non-binary characters - Adira.
83) And we're back to red alert. How...dull.
84) Standard Trek scene of everyone piling back onto the bridge.
85) So the lady who Saru relieved at the conn is Lt. Nilsson. Nilsson replaced Airiam as the bridge spore drive ops officer and is played by Sara Mitich...who played Airiam in Season 1 before being replaced in the role by Hannah Cheesman for S2.
86) Another character who can outsmart the Discoball crew. Not that it's much of an achievement, mind.
87) Bureaucrat wants to leave and can't. So that's at least slightly amusing.
88) Accuses the Disco crew of sabotage, because she's about as intelligent as Burnham.
89) Burnham has another plan. I wonder if it sucks? I bet it sucks.
90) Woohoo, yet another plot hole brought to you by the writing staff of STD and their utter failure to consider what came before! A (minor) plot point in the wonderful TNG episode "Relics" was that Scotty hadn't come across synthehol before - Data had to explain what it was, and then go find a real drink from Guinan's private stash under the bar (which turned out to be a bottle of Aldebaran whiskey that Picard had gotten her).
Scotty went into the pattern buffer in 2294. The Discoball came from 2258. So why would he be unaware of the existence of synthehol if it was around back when he was in Starfleet?
D'oh!
HELLOOOOOOO, EARTH TO STD WRITERS, DID ANYONE THINK TO SANITY-CHECK THEIR WORK?!?!?!
91) Burnham going with the whole 'seek forgiveness rather than ask permission' route. Just what Saru is going to need in an executive officer...
92) Back in the engine room, Stamets and Tilly digging into what's stopping the Earth defence force crew from beaming out. And it's not their tech, so it must be Adira since they were the only one with meaningful lines in the script earlier.
93) Stamets and Tilly agree with me.
94) I expect that was supposed to be witty. It really wasn't.
95) VFX team get to shine again briefly.
96) For those of you at 89) who bet against Burnham's plan sucking...you lose. How much did you bet?
97) Over to Book's ship, and two people being out-acted by a cat. Again.
98) Quantum torpedoes still exist then.
99) "Fire torpedoes in thirty seconds." Unnecessary countdowns brought to you by the bureaucrat.
100) God, there's more than ten minutes of this rubbish left.
101) Detmer attempting to be a voice of reason. Saru going with stupidly noble instead. Remember what quantum torpedoes used to do to ships in DS9? The Discoball is going to find out.
102) Sorry, Burnham has never let you down??? Really????
103) Welp, and they'd just got that bridge tidy this morning. I do hope no-one had to die for Burnham's dumb plan.
104) Oh, okay. So they're either beaming a bomb onto Wen's ship (which would be bloodthirsty even for Burnham) or beaming Wen off.
105) Beamed him off.
106) This is all completely stupid and terrible and I hate it.
107) !Georgiou losing patience with the whole bag of mashings. Much as I despise the character (and I do, genuinely, despise how they write !Georgiou), that was an amusing moment.
108) Those of you who couldn't guess that Wen was human under that helmet need to subject yourselves to Seasons 1 & 2 again, remind yourself how this series cannot do plot twists without telegraphing them light years in advance.
109) Back with Adira, as they do their little hacking mission.
110) Stamets calling them out.
111) "There's no-one like me." What, smug, blonde-haired gits with a wild superiority complex? Sure, Stamets. Okay
112) On the plus side, he's learned more in three minutes than Burnham would have managed in three months.
113) Exposition.
114) Yeah. Okay. Sure. Earth and Titan have been at odds with each other for ages, but the Discoball rocks up, gets them talking and everything is solved.
115) Soundtrack trying to use the Courage fanfare as if this isn't poorly-written arse gravy.
116) Adira joining the Discoball crew, because a ship that regularly gets the crap kicked out of it is the perfect environment for a 16 year old.
117) Adira is Tal. Calling it.
118) Called it. Though some advances must have been made, because when Riker had a Trill symbiont stuffed into him to save its life the joining couldn't happen for long.
119) Saru calling Burnham out for not informing him about her sucky plan that almost got the Discoball blown to Narnia by a couple of quantum torpedoes.
120) I'd call this exposition, if it was actually saying anything remotely interesting.
121) Book and Burnham parting ways for now. So, are they going to ride to his rescue in a later episode or is he going to ride to theirs?
122) I'm going to miss the cat, though. The cat was cool.
123) This is supposed to be heartwarming, and all I feel is a burning hatred for the writers.
124) Courage fanfare again, as we shoot past the San Fran landmarks.
125) "Next time..." Looks like they're off to get Adira's Trill link sorted.
Well, that was a curate's egg.
The good first. It was clearly a Frakes show, tight direction with no unnecessary ShakyCam™ or wild spinning. VFX team on point as always. Grudge the cat (played by a Maine **** called Leeu apparently) is cute. Some of the actors (Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman and a few of the bridge bunnies) didn't suck.
But good Lord do they need to hire new writers for this show, because the batch they have right now are just not good. Continuity is still out to lunch. The plot walks into itself with an audible thud. Then stuff gets wrapped up all neat 'n' tidy with a pretty bow on it in five seconds because they realised that they were at the end of the episode runtime and needed to get to the credits. And yet the only reason there was a plot to be wrapped up is that dumb people did something dumb for a dumb reason - the attack on a ship coming from Titan to try and get help. Now, I'm sorry but I just don't buy that an Earth not too far removed from the days of the Federation...they mentioned it had been 100 years since the United Earth seceded - so the Federation lasted ~928 years all told (2161 to ~3089) and in less than a hundred years after that Earth people turned into genocidal maniacs?
Bull. ****.
It's not just the writing of course, though that continues to be the biggest problem. The guest cast didn't cover themselves in glory. The music department got in the way at times and they can bloody well quit using the Courage fanfare, that should be reserved for much better work than this. And now SMG is playing Burnham in a lot of scenes with this weird kind of zen look. Well, it's zen or she's off her face. I guess it's to try and show how it's been a year away from the crew for her and she's changed. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement on the wide-eyed panic that she spent most of S2 in.
tl;dr this show sucks
The good first. It was clearly a Frakes show, tight direction with no unnecessary ShakyCam™ or wild spinning. VFX team on point as always. Grudge the cat (played by a Maine **** called Leeu apparently) is cute. Some of the actors (Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman and a few of the bridge bunnies) didn't suck.
But good Lord do they need to hire new writers for this show, because the batch they have right now are just not good. Continuity is still out to lunch. The plot walks into itself with an audible thud. Then stuff gets wrapped up all neat 'n' tidy with a pretty bow on it in five seconds because they realised that they were at the end of the episode runtime and needed to get to the credits. And yet the only reason there was a plot to be wrapped up is that dumb people did something dumb for a dumb reason - the attack on a ship coming from Titan to try and get help. Now, I'm sorry but I just don't buy that an Earth not too far removed from the days of the Federation...they mentioned it had been 100 years since the United Earth seceded - so the Federation lasted ~928 years all told (2161 to ~3089) and in less than a hundred years after that Earth people turned into genocidal maniacs?
Bull. ****.
It's not just the writing of course, though that continues to be the biggest problem. The guest cast didn't cover themselves in glory. The music department got in the way at times and they can bloody well quit using the Courage fanfare, that should be reserved for much better work than this. And now SMG is playing Burnham in a lot of scenes with this weird kind of zen look. Well, it's zen or she's off her face. I guess it's to try and show how it's been a year away from the crew for her and she's changed. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement on the wide-eyed panic that she spent most of S2 in.
tl;dr this show sucks
re: music overpowering the on-screen action
One of the many reasons for me why Wrath Of Khan works so well, not just as a Star Trek film but as a film? The soundtrack knows when to shut the **** up.
Take that scene on the Regula planetoid. David has taken McCoy and Saavik off to show them the Genesis cave, Chekov is unconscious and laid out recovering, Kirk is alone with Carol and in an atypically restrained way pours his heart out about the situation they're all in, about David, about how he feels utterly worn out. And there's no background music. It's just a man, sat despondently picking over some of his life choices. Later on in the Mutara nebula, Enterprise and Reliant have a fairly equal exchange of fire and are left hunting each other once more. And again the music goes away, you're just left with the bridge noise when the action goes inside and the static discharge sounds when it's a VFX shot and it all builds incredible tension. The music doesn't come back until Enterprise averts 2D space, ducks down and comes back up right behind Reliant to pound the snot out of her.
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