Star Trek Discovery S2 - E3-E7

[lightofdaye]

So now Season 3 is coming out, I've been watching Season 2 and episode a day-ish. From where I left off.

I wish I had more thoughts to share, I really do. I should go back toparaque and walgesang's posts from when they watched it. So here are some stream of consciousness thoughts.


Basically, it's fine but not great stuff. They seem to be consciously trying to back track and address unpopular (maybe?) things from Season 1; the holograms, the klingons start to become more TOS-y with a D7 cruiser, killing off Culber so they're spending a lot of time re-arranging their pieces to suit their new story.

There's something weirdly informal about the crew in this series. Like usually the main characters are the senior staff of the ship. This time, we've some senior crew, a random ensign, and Stamets, who I forgot wasn't the chief engineer a bit. Tilly despite being a newly minted ensign is involved in all the action. It feels like they've turned 'the main character do everything' up to eleven despite having tried to shake things up.

People move around the setting fairly easily as well, Number One and another officer from the Enterprise seem to appear randomly in episode 3 even though they're no-where near the Enterprise I think and now Michael seems to be swanning about the galaxy quite easily in a shuttle.

The camera work is occasionally weird as well, they tried to spice up one briefing scene by just having the camera constantly circle the cast.

I think the plot with Spock and the red angel is finally starting to gather pace in episode 7, where I've left off with this post but it feels odd as well. And the Section 31 plotline.... urgh. Section 31 should have been left in DS9 imho. It operating openly in DIS is... weird. I get the impression from spoilers though it's going to be driven underground during the show. Which is good because Admirals opening going on about how good it is and so necessary and so on.. is not really the message one wants to here.

But they are obviously trying to consistently portray the Discovery crew at least as principled and idealist which is good.

Comments

[pauraque]

I share many of your opinions on this. It got to be kind of funny how many things they were scrambling to fix from S1. (I actually forgot about Pike nixing the holograms!) I couldn't complain too much because I thought the changes were generally improvements, but the retconning was pretty clumsy in many places.

I thought the informality was weird too. It's often unclear who's in charge. Engineering is an example but it also happens in Sickbay (I was never sure if Culber was supposed to be the CMO or if it was that other doctor who's always there to deliver exposition) and like, for a while Tyler is supposed to be chief of security but we rarely if ever see him doing that job. And after his plot stuff happens, who replaces him? In general the command structure feels very loose, and people's ranks never seem to matter. There were a few points where I thought Michael was way out of line in pushing Pike to do what she thought was best, and I was surprised that he allowed it. It does seem like the writers just want their favorite characters to do everything, regardless of whether it makes sense.

[lightofdaye]

Well the holograms thing is weird because Pike doesn't use it and orders it ripped out of the Enterprise, but everyone else on Discovery keeps using it so it doesn't really 'fix' the continuity issue there. Though to be honest I'm happy thinking of Disco as it's own thing separate from the other series.

I'm not sure either of them is the CMO, it does make sense because the CMO wouldn't do everything but still having that one Doc they always go still doesn't make sense from a 'real life' perspective, while making senses of a show one. *shrugs*

[walgesang]

Interesting thoughts! I still need to get going on my Season 3 recaps but I'm thinking I may wait until the weekend.

[lightofdaye]

Thanks! Should be done with S2 and move onto s3 this weekend :)