[Three of Seven]

The combat scenes really had that battlestar galactica chaotic feel to, I am going to watch it again tonight to see everything I missed. It was a jam packed two hours.

also, back on Enterprise, don'ft forget about the Borg history revision.. lol

There was a lot of BSG to this, like the warp in effect, reminded me of the way FTL worked in BSG.

Also, Enterprise, much about that I didn't like being a prequal is always going to be hard.

I also hate that they killed captain Georgiou, although the actress is listed for all the episodes on IMDB.

[Saelanna]

I also hate that they killed captain Georgiou, although the actress is listed for all the episodes on IMDB.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see Captain Georgiou in a few more flashback scenes if Michelle Yeoh is listed for all of them. Was also disappointed that she died, she was my personal favourite in the two episodes.

[Rellimie]

I wouldn't be surprised if we see Captain Georgiou in a few more flashback scenes if Michelle Yeoh is listed for all of them. Was also disappointed that she died, she was my personal favourite in the two episodes.

Agreed on the flashbacks.

They had her listed as a “Special Guest Star” in the opening credits.

[Silynn]

Personally, I can go the entire season of watching Discovery as I find Noram's timed comments 1000% better.

Keep up the great and stellar work Noram!

They are a worthwhile read and I will continue to read them while you do them.

[Bridger]

1. First Contact with the Klingons was nothing like how it had been explained in canon

It lead to more than 70 Years of Cold War with Klingon Empire and getting hot once.

2. Xindi

Could you give some more details.

3. A Vulcan science officer (Spock was supposed to be the first, making her non starfleet was a cheap way to get around it)

If I remember me correctly it was never mentioned in canon that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet.

4. Starfleet was too advanced, they had more primative weapons in their war with the Romulans

Yeap that is absolutely true, and also the Romulans were more advanced than they should be.

[Sul-Matuul]

I didn't really have a problem with it tbh. At this stage in the show it's impossible to work out where it's heading, we've not met too many people, seen Earth or any other planets than that desert pre-warp place, nor have we really done any exploring yet.

So at this stage it is all a mystery and that i find really nice for once. A post-Nemesis trek would have been too predictable, too much of the same, and with even more canon to follow. At least STD can fill in a void we know little about.
They can nicely ignore the Romulans altogether, they can add in some nice Klingon history.

Speaking of the Klingons; i thought it was an interesting way to have essentially a religious nutter take the lead. A fanatic willing to take his people to war and trying to get their support.....similarity to today's global issues abound.
Making the 24 houses look different too was a nice touch, even down to the different ships they all used. I may not quite like the look of the Klingons, and personally think the makeup sort of hides any facial expressions, but they have a cool enough look to be memorable.

[Petrarch]

I got around to watching the episodes tonight and I rather quite enjoyed it.

Yes, it's early days and there's a couple of "hmm" moments but on the whole, I think it's one to stick with, give a chance and see where it goes.

Risk of unpopular opinion - leaving aside everything else, I think the visual aspect reboot was necessary. TOS is a great show, but visually, it's a product of the 1960's and it shows compared to the standards of today. It certainly is not without its charms, but I think if that had of been the front and centre style used week in week out by Discovery, it would become rather jarring after a while.

The USS Shenzou has definitely been confirmed now as an older ship as there was a mention that the transporters are an older type no longer used by Starfleet so I'm interested to see what way the Discovery is positioned when it appears, as that, by logic of the registry number, should be an older again ship. Though that being said, the numbers have always been kind of screwy in Trek up until TNG appeared.

[jammers195]

Meh............ back to Babylon 5 and DS9 I go

[Sul-Matuul]

The TOS series look the way it does because they had no other option, that was literally all the tech they had to make a sci-fi show back then.
Also a lot of the tech they figured would be futuristic and the like we have in our back pockets right now, so it will always look dated.
I bet they'd have love to make holo-comm thingys and the like but just could not with the filming tech available.
I mean do you not think that all those older sci-fi shows in B&W (like the original Dr Who) would have loved to be able to film in colour to show off their wonderful costumes and sets?

So in order to make this new show look "older" but also make sense to today's audience it simply has to have some differences. Those holo projector things to us right now seem like something we could realistically have in say 100 years, so i have no issue with them. Maybe if budgets had been bigger for TNG etc we'd have seen them., and to be honest the tech was there, Tasha Yar created a holo version of herself for Data and holodecks were on the Ent-D from the start! The filming budget was not there though, doesn't mean the tech was not.

The sort of things that would utterly make no sense and break from canon would be changing something massive, like they now use hyper-drives or Stargates in place of warp drives. Or have Vulcans be the total opposite of what went before. But to add in some new takes on existing tech is not a world breaker to me personally.

[Curzon Peers]

Frankly I think the tech discussion is a bit TOO nitpicky. I will grant the complaints about holograms a bit since it was explicitly new in TNG (though I will point out one of the main things with holograms in the TNG era is they have a physicality to them, they aren't JUST projected images like this was), but the spacesuits and forcefields are being complained about based on nothing tangible.

I hear talk that TOS didn't have the fancy spacesuits, that a thruster pack is too high tech. Well, we never actually saw them put on spacesuits to go outside the ship. The closest we ever came was them putting on environment suits to investigate a derelict ship and Kirk happened to end up floating in space. It reminds me a bit of the launch suits astronauts wear that only protect against depresurization but are smaller and lighter than a suit that protects against vacuum, radiation, debris, and extremes of temperature.

Same thing with the force fields. We never saw the Enterprise shot up to that extent. Beyond that, I should point out that this could also just be a visual thing. It's a stylistic choice (good or not, I don't know), but this is the first time we've even SEEN a force field that wasn't malfunctioning or being touched. The argument that we never saw invisible force fields in use is a bit of an absurdity as far as an argument goes.

===
Now, I will agree there are some aesthetic incongruities and they are rather jarring. The big windows are impressive to be sure, but that's DEFINITELY something we've never seen. Every ship besides this one had a viewscreen, and the space battles looked more like something from Star Wars with the long thin laser bolts rather than the Star Trek aesthetic of beams and cannon bolts being balls of energy. The Klingon makeup also seems like a big mistake as well, though I wonder if people would still complain if they used TNG era makeup rather than the TOS makeup of darker skinned actors wearing the the couple of hair appliances (like the signature mustache).


Frankly, Star Trek has never been any good at continuity, and are always quick to BS their way out of a situation with tehcnobable. We can't beam through the shields except for the few dozen times the plot requires that to happen, for instance. Given that, I'm willing to give it a pass as long as they can write a good story, so I have to take a wait and see approach. Thus far, Star trek series haven't had good first seasons, so it does seem odd to me to have so many people complaining about a single two part episode.

[LegateImperator]

Go through any Star Trek show, they all crap all over established canon.

I like to deal with this by thinking of each show as a record of events, the accuracy of the record depends on individuals, some details are recalled differently, some moments are written better than they may have occurred. That's how I explain the discrepancies.

[Three of Seven]

The tech isn't my biggest problem with Discovery, a lot of the tech is goofy and needless, they didn't need to have the holographic projections or a silly robot on the bridge, or a glass viewscreen, but they did.

My biggest problem is the "main character", I don't like that the whole thing seems to be focused around the story of one person, not the ship, not the crew, one person. I can ignore technology and inconsistencies, I did for Enterprise, but the fact that we have a story based on an individual really doesn't feel like the sort of Star Trek I used to enjoy.

I don't watch TV shows for a single character, I like team based shows, where you have focus on your main cast. You will have a lead role, but you won't have a main role, not in the shows I like to watch anyway. Maybe the focus will move away from her, but I don't think it will.

The main character is arrogant, thinks she knows everything, she's just all round rude. How someone like that even reached the rank of Commander in the first place is more of a mystery than the way Klingons look! If you can't tell, I really don't like her.

[Vox]

I just watched both episodes now and I enjoyed them and from the preview it looks like it's going to be an interesting series. Not 100% sure if I was in the US it would be enough to get me to sign up to CBS All Access in order to watch the rest of it but that's a different discussion.

As for the episodes I thought they were pretty good although I did have a moment where I was like "Oh not the Klingons again." It's not that I don't like them it's just that we pretty much already know the ins and outs of them although they had an interesting take on them in terms of the religious leader trying to unite the houses like Sul said above, in fact I was a little disappointed when they killed him as I thought he was an interesting leader and could have had quite an interesting back story based on the little we saw of him as a child but at the same time as someone who grew up with Trek and knowing about the Klingons it was a bit predictable in terms of how it was going to go. However I get that for the first two episodes they want to go with something most people are familiar with, even those not necessarily Trek fans have a rough idea of what a Klingon is based on pop culture and it did seem a bit rushed how they set it up.

Speaking of which and something that Sammy said we're now in the Game of Thrones era of television where not only does that show take it's time to establish it's characters and spread out it's story but it's proven that people today are perfectly fine with that level of detail and establishment and have the attention span to follow longer plots and ideas, which goes double for Sci-Fi fans and Trek fans who have always been more on the intelligent side of things, much like in gaming how you've got the more Bethesda style paint by numbers RPG vs say that of The Witcher and how more and more people today are want more like The Witcher and less like Skyrim, not in terms of gameplay or anything but in terms of the fact that The Witcher games treat the players like we actually are intelligent and not idiots whereas Skyrim it's the opposite, TV is much the same nowadays and GoT is one of the shows that does the same thing and assumes that the people watching it actually have a brain and can follow it.

But then again this is the first two episodes and I think a little leeway has to be given because their job let's be honest is to pull in viewers and get people to keep watching so I think that has to be taken into account unless that's also how the rest of the shows are going to go too, but it's too soon to say on that.

As for character development I get people's comments like Three's about the focus being mostly on Sonequa Martin-Green's character and how she came across as a bit of a know it all which could be annoying if it continues but at the same time she wasn't wrong either about the Klingon's as long as she doesn't continue to come across that way I think she'll be okay. As for the focus being on her more than anybody else like Three said, I can understand where he's coming from and I would agree if all those other characters on the ship besides Saru were going to be in the show going forwards but considering it at least looks so far like it will mostly be her and him on the new ship going forward I can see why they focused mostly on her for now as the main character without establishing more of the others, which could just be an issue with starting the first two episodes with one crew on one ship them moving those, at least as far as the preview for the rest of the season goes two characters from one ship to another that they wouldn't bother too much with character development on anyone else besides the main character for those episodes, then having do to so again with the crew of the new ship from the next episode onward. I would also echo what Sammy said about her getting her comeuppance for everything she did and ending up facing justice for it all.

Tech wise yeah it's set in the past but looks more futuristic than say TNG and DS9 and even to an extent Voyager and the Enterprise-E the two most advanced main character ships in the fleet timeline wise but in someways that's more to do with what we're capable of doing now than we were back in the Voyager and Nemesis days in terms of CGI and effects. Yes they could have made the look and feel of the ships older but it's the same conversation that we've had with the JJ Universe and how it's still Kirk and Spock and their version of the Enterprise in their timeline but looks more advanced tech wise than what it should do for the year it's set in comparison too TNG-VOY years, I think we should all be able to look past that.

As for the episodes overall, I tend not to just the first few episodes as critically personally as they are that, the first episodes and although it does have it's issues like pacing and some things going faster than others they also have the job of trying to get you to watch more episodes that follow and I've got to be honest, for me it worked, I do want to see more, if those episodes manage to keep me in for the long haul or not will be another matter but for now they did their job and I think at least worthy of seeing a few more episodes and how they handle the more week by week episodic stuff as well as the larger arcs before judging the show too harshly but based on the opinions I had when they show was announced and what stuff they had previewed of it and the speculative opinions I had formed based on them to what it actually was it was better than I thought it was going to be personally.