paramount+ Star Trek Discovery - Season 3

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

So we were now blessed with episode three and it was kind of "meh." In principle just a little somewhat slower paced filler episode with a non important b-story to lay the groundwork for the things to come, which you need now and then.

Oh and, of course - Burnham saved the day again. Sighs.

By the way talking about plot holes: so the one, big thing which changed the whole game is the great fire, when all dilithium in the galaxy went POOF at the same time everywhere for unknown reasons. As a result FTL travel became almost extinct in this time line.

The simple question is: why are there no alternative methods for FTL travel around there at large scale? The Romulans according to Trek canon were always using a different energy source, a quantum singularity. Dilithium is used only to control matter/anti matter reactions, so no need for this in a Romulan Warbird warp engine.

So this just makes no sense whatsoever with the explanations we got by now; Romulans should be just doing fine, and many other space faring species should have tried to copy their technology.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

I'm having a hard time connecting with this season. It feels like they have too little time stretched over too many characters and I'm finding myself not able to get emotionally invested in any of them.

I desperately hope this doesn't roll into a "The Burn was so awful, we should time travel back and prevent it!" season finale, I'm burned out on temporal reset stories.

Whatever they do next, it's time to move past this maudlin 'reunion/missed-you/I've changed/we lost so much/this is who we are now' fluff and get some traction on an actual plot that's does more than present another mcguffin-problem that's miraculously 'solved' by the end of the episode. 'Nuf talking about 'the feels' ... show'm and make me feel'm or shut-up and move on.

 

[Sean Gorham]

I think these first episodes are just setting the stage for what's to come. We haven't truly bitten into the meat of Season 3 yet.

The Romulans according to Trek canon were always using a different energy source, a quantum singularity. Dilithium is used only to control matter/anti matter reactions, so no need for this in a Romulan Warbird warp engine.

So this just makes no sense whatsoever with the explanations we got by now; Romulans should be just doing fine, and many other space faring species should have tried to copy their technology.

You raise a valid point. Maybe the Romulans are doing fine. Maybe they turned inward at some point. We simply have no way of knowing until and if the writers address it.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Episode four has now been aired, and it was an even slower paced episode than the one before.

The main plot of this episode was to introduce us to the character of Adira well enough as she got in sync with her Trill symbiont, so we now do know about her past. And basically that's all about it, B plot was nice but really unimportant in the grand scheme of events: Saru trying to lighten up the mood of the crew using the advise of an somewhat strangely evolved and now very wiser ship's computer.

Now that the Discovery has the coordinates for the new Federation HQ I expect the show to gain more speed in the next episode.

Although again we have a plot hole.

Spoiler

Anybody who remembers Deep Space Nine is aware about that the trill symbionts actually can live in almost any Trill body, and not just some few. This myth invented back then by the Trill authorities to prevent 1 million trills wanting to have one of the 10000 symbionts, or so. The Trill authorities knew about it very well, and kept it as a close guarded secret.

So since what we saw today is more or less the acting ruling body of these future Trills, including religious caste, they should be really aware about that the symbionts are really as not picky as they perceive them to be, other species or not. Especially considering the fact that the symbionts are kind of long lived libraries.

 

[Sean Gorham]

The B story was very important: it showed how the entire crew was suffering from the trauma of jumping 900+ years into the future and being disconnected from everybody they ever knew. Saru was desperately trying to come up with a way to bring the crew together. (How about that ship's computer, hmmmmmm?) Tensions flared, showing how almost everybody was suffering from some amount of PTSD - just like Burnham and Adira over in A-story-land were. Saru's trying to turn the crew into something more - a family.

This whole episode was about trying to heal a little bit before tackling the next big thing.

 

[Lucifer]

So, yeah. Civilisation hasw collapsed. One ship and her crew stand against the chaos. It's basically a rehash of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (which was Gene's plan for a post federation Star Trek, anyway, but the producers didn't have rights to Star Trek, so made up a new millieu), and that's not a bad thing, it's a positive.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Civilisation has not collapsed, as you can see at Earth and many other places. Civilisation is still there, and in full blossom.

What has collapsed is FTL space travel.

 

[Lucifer]

And you could say the exact same thing about the Andromeda Milleu, or any post apocalyptic scenario.

"Civilisation has not collapsed, as you can see by the New California Republic and The Enclave, what has collapsed is the US postal service3"

See?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Again you got it wrong. Collapse of civilisation inclines that the way of living has returned to a more primitive way of life, and that wisdom/technology has been lost.

What we saw from Earth is that it is doing well, just lost FTL travel capability. Aside that no new medieval ages or whatsoever.

What we have though is the collapse of the Federation, an inter planetary and inter civilisation organization. This is not equal to the collapse of civilisation, but something totally different.

 

[Lexxi]

Episode four has now been aired, and it was an even slower paced episode than the one before.

The main plot of this episode was to introduce us to the character of Adira well enough as she got in sync with her Trill symbiont, so we now do know about her past. And basically that's all about it, B plot was nice but really unimportant in the grand scheme of events: Saru trying to lighten up the mood of the crew using the advise of an somewhat strangely evolved and now very wiser ship's computer.

Now that the Discovery has the coordinates for the new Federation HQ I expect the show to gain more speed in the next episode.

Although again we have a plot hole.

Spoiler

Anybody who remembers Deep Space Nine is aware about that the trill symbionts actually can live in almost any Trill body, and not just some few. This myth invented back then by the Trill authorities to prevent 1 million trills wanting to have one of the 10000 symbionts, or so. The Trill authorities knew about it very well, and kept it as a close guarded secret.

So since what we saw today is more or less the acting ruling body of these future Trills, including religious caste, they should be really aware about that the symbionts are really as not picky as they perceive them to be, other species or not. Especially considering the fact that the symbionts are kind of long lived libraries.

You might already have known this but "an somewhat strangely evolved and now very wiser ship's computer." -

Spoiler

The computer merged with the computer Discovery picked up that has 100,000 years of knowledge in it. So it is strangely evolved, yes, being a mix of the two

As far as the Trill issue, I thought it was more that

Spoiler

a good percentage, unknown but probably a huge number, 75%? of the joined Trill were on ships that exploded; so it is less forgetting that Trill symbionts could merge with any Trill but more of an issue that there are very few Trill symbionts still around. Which is why I was quite surprised they would let one leave (in fact, ordered them to leave at first). And I fully expected, once they did leave, that at least one of the Trill would join the ship to go with the joined Human.

I'd probably have to rewatch the episode, though, to make sure what I thought I saw was correct.

 

[Lexxi]

Again you got it wrong. Collapse of civilisation inclines that the way of living has returned to a more primitive way of life, and that wisdom/technology has been lost.

What we saw from Earth is that it is doing well, just lost FTL travel capability. Aside that no new medieval ages or whatsoever.

What we have though is the collapse of the Federation, an inter planetary and inter civilisation organization. This is not equal to the collapse of civilisation, but something totally different.

Eh, it's a collapse of one civilization. The Federation wide civilization - that collapsed.

One of the things that confused me during the episode set in the Sol system - there were a bunch of people living off earth before Discovery went to the future, so what happened to them?

Spoiler

Yes, I know that the 'villains' turned out to humans from other parts of the Sol system, but I was referring to Mars. First episode of Discovery takes place in 2255. In 2161, Mars was a charter member of the United Federation of Planets. By 2378, there were more than 133.8 million living on Mars. Current Discovery is in something like, what, 3141. So where'd the hundreds of millions on Mars go?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

So today we were blessed with episode 5. Discovery reached the heavily cloaked Federation HQ and as some goodies "old" ship models which never appeared on screen before, like the Voyager J, were shown. They were questioned by their buddies because there are no records about the ship in their database, and had to run some errands to gain their trust and save some aliens.

More like a building ground episode again.

Interesting stuff: our terran imperator can turn off holograms of the 32nd century just by blinking at them in the right way. Federation was too dumb to fix that security exploit in over 900 years. Really?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Episode 6 aired now, and finally it's gaining up some speed, this means we are half through already with this 13 episode spanning season. The Discovery has been updated mostly to the 32th century technology with all kind of new shiny techbabble mumbo jumbo stuff which looks great and aside nobody really cares about explaining (which is a good change for Star Trek in a while), and is now the most important ship of the wrecked Federation because it can reach any point in the Federation space literally within seconds. This also means that the Discovery cannot just travel around as it wants to, and it has been accepted back into star fleet.

The main plot is Burnham's search for ancient flight recorders of space ships which were wrecked during the burn. The idea is to check the time stamp in them, and if there's a small difference in time stamps of two different recorders it means that the burn has some point of origin they hope to triangulate down with enough flight recorder data.

Burnham does again what she likes to do most and makes once more pretty clear why she's really a bad choice for a star fleet officer: disobeying direct orders. She's running a silent rogue mission with Philippa against her captain's orders to rescue Booker, who is on some type of space ship scrap yard in search for that flight recorder and claimed to have found one. Philippa has more and more flash backs she cannot explain, which becomes a concern for Burnham as well.

B-plot is this time how Captain Saru deals with the disobedience of Burnham, and its consequences for Burnham.

C-plot is Stamits befriending Adira, the human trill symbiont partner, because they've got something in common: both have a dead friend they were talking to.

 

[Kara Spengler]

I think these first episodes are just setting the stage for what's to come. We haven't truly bitten into the meat of Season 3 yet.




You raise a valid point. Maybe the Romulans are doing fine. Maybe they turned inward at some point. We simply have no way of knowing until and if the writers address it.

Hmm, I had not thought of it either. There have been multiple alternetive methods to travel shown but the romulan method would be the most known one.

 

[Lucifer]

While the Romulans used quantum sinularities, they also had a huge dilithium mining operation on Remus. It's entirelty likely they had matter/antimatter back up power, much like the federation had fusion reactors as back up.

 

[Lucifer]

further, it';s entirely possible the creation of these artificial singularities required matter/antimatter reactions.

 

[Lexxi]

I'm now at the point of fast forwarding a lot. I'm getting tired of how every little thing results in Michael Burnham looking like she's trying to hold back her emotions about learning her favorite puppy was just run over by a truck. And the rest of the crew . . . are not really better.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Episode 7 is now out. Burnham has been demoted by Captain Saru in the last episode, and is no longer 2nd in command of the Discovery. They have now three flight recorders of space ships which were somewhere in the quadrant during the burn, but this is not enough to locate the origin of it. Luckily though to the time of the burn there was an interstellar sensor network run by the Vulcans active, which might have scanned something. On the bad side Vulcan left the Federation before the burn, and they never gave the Federation this data.

The planet Vulcan has also been renamed Ni'var, because Vulcans and Romulans have been reunited thanks to Spock and are now living in a fragile coexistence there. Main plot is that Burnham by official order of the Federation's Admiral Vance travels to Ni'var, trying to convince them to hand out the data of the scanner network. During this Burnham also surprisingly reunites with her mother, and invokes an old Vulcanic ritual to get it. At the end she's successful, and gets the data.

B plot is ensign Tilly's promotion to commander by Captain Saru, how she deals with her doubts about that and how her comrades are supporting her to make that step.

C plot is Burnham finally recognizing who she is, and what she really wants from life: a future with Booker and restoring the Federation.

Production wise this is a really low budget episode; no space battles, and despite they are visting the planet Vulcan there are no exterior shots on the surface of that planet nor interior shots in Vulcan buildings. Most shots are either within Federation HQ or inside the Discovery sets. I guess after the last episode they had to cut some corners to save up some budget.

What's really mindboggling is that the Vulcans right from the beginning did not question the identity of Michael Burnham; they just accepted her as Spock's sister without doing some checks first. Even given the long life span of Vulcans Spock died in that time line centuries ago, so this is really strange.

Also despite being demoted standing aside Saru in front of Vance, who knew by Saru about it, Burnham simply cannot shut up her mouth for once and respect the chain of commands, but instead again starts without permission an emotional speech about the importance of getting the data. Vance though did agree, which probably surprised all of them.

So after the more faster action paced episode again quite a more relaxed paced one, which though has some important character development.

 

[Lucifer]

What's really mindboggling is that the Vulcans right from the beginning did not question the identity of Michael Burnham; they just accepted her as Spock's sister without doing some checks first. Even given the long life span of Vulcans Spock died in that time line centuries ago, so this is really strange.

Except of course that her mother was on Vulcan, and knew she was time travelling, so there's that.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Well her mother was there, yes. But her mother just like the Vulcans did not have the opportunity to verify Burnham's identity upfront really face to face, so this still is a little bit muddy.