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CBS premiered its new Star Trek series "Discovery" on Sunday. The first episode was made available on OTA (over-the-air) CBS stations — but it and all subsequent episodes are available strictly on CBS's All Access streaming service. Cost is $6/month with ads, $10/month ad-free. (NOTE: The second episode was made available immediately after episode 1 aired. Episodes 3-7 will be released weekly, there will be a break, and then the remaining episodes will again be released weekly early in 2018.)
Ars Technica has a review that mostly praised the new show. (There were at least two technical inaccuracies in the review concerning the first episode.)
For those who may not yet have seen it, I kindly ask folks who comment on this story to make liberal use of the <spoiler>don't show this unless they click here</spoiler> tags.
What did you think? Was it entertaining? Did it hold closely [enough] to existing Star Trek canon? Was any 'ideology' change you saw sufficiently warranted?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:40PM (5 children)
I downloaded both episodes, but only watched the first one so far. Observations:
So, to sum it up, they've captured the essence of Trek perfectly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:18PM
Setting up a contemporaneous voice recording is good. What if the (as happened) the video failed? What if a detail was noticed by the person but not the camera? Sure, it's hopefully redundant, but it also costs very little.
It can also be useful for after-action reports. Why did you do stupid thing X? Oh, you thought you saw a Y, then it makes sense.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 26 2017, @07:27PM (3 children)
The sad part is five minutes with any random SN poster level of wizardry could have fixed all those.
The voice narration means two things:
1) Scotty called from engineering, says the music budget can't handle the stress or it'll fly apart
2) 2001 disease where the whole point of the monolith is the 3rd party viewer sees the observer disappear and thats it, whereas the observer has an entirely different experience of an intense acid trip. I suppose a better "real world" protocol would be having the crew watch a downlink and narrate it while the suit rogers or comments on what the camera misses. OR insert technobable about radio silence type stuff. OR insert technobabble about ancient 1960s era active guided weapons, surely a little thingy moving toward you in contact with the big ship is a semi-active radar homing sparrow missile from 1967 but a radio silent-ish or low bandwidth suit is peaceful. Although see #1 above we're getting into the territory of easily fixed writing.
It kinda makes you wonder, in the sense that everyone in all occupations has the experience that journalists know absolutely nothing about MY profession but surely they're experts on all other professions. And if people cross check they find out that all journalism is pretty much universally crap. My point being that we know Hollywood can't produce sci fi because "we" are all sci fi fans here. But I wonder if cat ladies watching steamy romances think hollywood can't write steamy romances worth a damn but surely they're experts at sci fi. My point being I wonder if hollywood/american tv is an epic fail at everything or merely an epic fail at sci fi. See my other comment about "Star Trek Continues" to point out that apparently its "cheap" (relatively) and "easy" (relatively) to produce super high quality sci fi that doesn't suck; there is no defense of hollywood that we're asking the impossible of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:58PM
Given what the fanfic community has to say about romances, I'd say it's pretty safe to say that people that enjoy romances think the ones written by fans are a lot better than the ones that get filmed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:14PM (1 child)
Mostly, but the radiation one is damn hard to fix. That exact set of "rules" for radiation exposure is ubiquitous precisely because screenwriters want something with those exact characteristics to drive suspense. And while radiation exposure doesn't really work that way, neither does anything else!
The closest I can think of is orbital mechanics -- with fixed fuel supply and launch time, this gives you hard mass limits (as in Cold Hard Facts, love it or hate it), whereas for fixed fuel and mass, it gives you hard launch windows. That's actually perfect -- stopwatch of peril, but Our Hero can overstay, and make it back anyhow (by heroically jettisoning mass). Problem is, it doesn't apply to Trek, or most other starfaring scifi, because any tech that lets you make an actual starship lets you laugh at the very idea of orbits; it takes real work to justify why starships can stationkeep wherever the fuck they want, but shuttles, jetpacked spacesuits, and the like are all stuck with realistic physics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:14PM
Oops, I meant "The Cold Equations".