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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: 2, Insightful) by sunami88 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:47PM (7 children)
*Spoilers for a premier to a thing you really should have watched before clicking on this article*
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I desperately wanted to like it. Really, I did. We had 7,000 episodes of old (boring) Trek - and some of them were phenomenal, and I knew that post-2009 that wasn't what we were going to get. But what the good sweet fuck was up with the Klingon design? Particularly the ships? I found my eyes drifting away from the screen during all the subtitled dialogue because the awkward sounds of the actors working around all that shit on their face conveyed what was going on just as well as the text.
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There were moments that really endeared the series to me, but I saw the Captain and Number 2 described somewhere as "suicide queens" and I couldn't have put it better myself. Ignoring that I really enjoyed watching their interplay. Too bad the Captain is dead. The show had me right up until the last few seconds of the latter episode, and REALLY lost me at the "This Season on Star Trek". I remember Starfleet being kind of quirky at times (i.e. passing Kirk specifically for hacking the Kobayashi Maru), and I really thought with all the character development we were going to get Michael boosted up to Captain, especially because the fleet will be starved for Good Captains.
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But no. It's going to be another over dramatized war show. In this day and age, is that really what we need? Why not some escapism/optimism for Gene's sake?
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You know, when Axanar came out it was a breath of fresh air for us Trekkies that had been waiting for something, ANYTHING to materialize. Now that Paramont has copied that premise wholesale it seems really hollow. Like they ripped of that fantastic premise but didn't know where to take it. Matter of fact, it felt a bit like a trainwreck.
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We've seen Trek come back from worse (Enterprise Season 4, subtitled "Too little, too late"), but this was a fumbling, stumbling start.
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Anyways, I could drone on for hours - I'm a trekkie after all. TL;DR- I'm hoping for a season 2 reboot.
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...OK one last thing: If there had been ONE MORE sliding dutch angle I was going to puke. I know this is sexy and sleek Trek (two things that have never merged well with Trek) but ffs...
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:52PM (4 children)
Since you watched the show, can you explain why the two women are wearing Islamic garb? Is this series about Islam?
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:56PM (3 children)
What? Are you referring to the first scene? They are out walking in a desert. They are wearing something appropriate for that. Something that covers you entire body and face. It had nothing to do with religion or Islam.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:03PM (2 children)
Why do practitioners of Islam wear that sort of garb in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and other non-desert environments? Clearly such garb is related to the religion, rather than to any practical concern.
Having established that, why are the characters in this series wearing Islamic garb? Do the early Starfleet members practice Islam? This puts an interesting twist on things, as the later series tended to not focus on traditional religion at all. If religion was mentioned, it was typically non-human religions.
(Score: 4, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:13PM
For cultural reasons. They wore clothing like that before there was even Islam. It's adaptation to the elements and not your God. It has nothing to do with it. But this wasn't even that. It was literally being outside, in a desert, with a sandstorm approaching. They didn't go out there to have a good pray to Allah.
When they run around Tatooine in Star Wars they also wear similar outfits, they are not space-muslims in a galaxy far far away.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 26 2017, @06:34PM
Why do practitioners of Islam wear that sort of garb in London, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, and other non-desert environments? Clearly such garb is related to the religion, rather than to any practical concern.
It's for the same dumb reason that Jews won't eat pork or shellfish: back in ancient times when the religion was started, such a rule made good sense (they didn't know how to make pig meat safe to store and eat apparently, and people got sick), but back then people were stupid and superstitious, so I guess the leaders couldn't just tell people "Don't do this, it's unsafe", and instead then had to tell people "God said not to do this, or else!!!". Well, since God supposedly said this, obviously we can't have God changing his mind now that we have better technology and better knowledge of food safety, so the believers refuse to update their practices, and we get stupid shit like laws forbidding the mixing of fibers.
It's also worth noting that not all Muslims wear that crap. The ones from Malaysia, Indonesia, etc., don't wear desert garb; the men wear whatever, and the women wear whatever plus just wear a headscarf for "modesty". And not all women wear headscarves; that too varies by both culture and preference. Some that I've worked with from India and Pakistan don't. Similarly, not all Christians dress like this [activly.com] or this [mapministry.org] or this [pbs.org], though certainly the number of Muslims who adhere to dress codes is a higher proportion than Christians.
(Score: 2, Funny) by sunami88 on Tuesday September 26 2017, @05:53PM (1 child)
Heh, sorry to self reply but I referred to Michael as Number 2 instead of Number 1. Can you tell what was on my mind while I was writing that? :P
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:07AM
You weren't pushing hard enough for Number 1?
Washington DC delenda est.