I said a while back that I was gonna change my name due to my obscene displeasure with the final season but… nah. I’m Stamets. I love my lil gay boy and I love his lil gay family and I love the ship with the weirdly long nacelles.
LD being canon takes away some of the sting of Disco being canon. Since it’s so far in the future the last 3 seasons can also easily be ignored.
As it should be.
Cartoons can’t be, simple fact.
This is false.
LD directly crossed over with SNW, so if LD isn’t canon then neither is SNW.
Prodigy is brilliant so if it’s not canon what’s the point?
Personally, I just look at all new shows as their own thing and only care if the canon is consistent within each show.
I just can’t reconcile SNW bridge vs OS bridge. So it’s a multiverse or whatever. Who cares? It’s not like keeping canon consistent was that important to the old shows.
Whatever happened with those brain slugs in TNG S1??
It’s a simple fact.
If that’s your head canon go for it. Fact is though the animated works are just as canon as any of live action works.
As weird as it sounds, it’s like I can’t accept it’s “real” because it’s animated, despite the fact it’s all fiction.
Lol. So not a fact.
No, not at all. Simple fact.
Bees. Bears. Battlestar Galactica.
But you can accept the fact that the TV shows are “real” even though they’re just pixels on a screen changing colour? The fact that you can’t step through the screen and walk around the Enterprise because it’s actually just a sound stage in Toronto is completely fine with you, but the moment someone drew the Enterprise instead of building it out of plywood and furniture they bought at Structube, that’s when you drew the line and declared “No! No more! I will accept God like beings who alter reality at a snap of their fingers, but this, this I will not stand for!”?
Because buddy, let me tell you, that’s a really, really weird hill to die on.
Yeah, I already acknowledged it was a little weird. Nevertheless, I am making my last stand here, on this non-existent hill. My brain can suspend disbelief for either, but apparently not within the same narrative universe. Is that called a digesis, or is that something else?
All Star Trek live-action television series and films are and always have been generally considered part of the canon,[2] while Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Prodigy are both fully accepted as canonical as well.
Here’s my question, LDS makes direct references to TAS, does that have some transitive property magic that makes TAS canon or at least partly canon?
It’s in flux. Some parts are canon and other parts are up in the air. Portions of it have been taken. One example is that the Enterprise wasn’t originally under the command of Pike but of Robert April, however he’s white in TAS and black in SNW. So the answer is sorta kinda not really maybe?
Star Trek Latter Day Saints
Simple fact.
So a factors just your opinion right. And therefore not a fact
Stamets is great. I love him.
I love a LOT of the characters on discovery, but I just found the story arcs it ended up telling very… Overblown.
Did the disco really have to save the literal galaxy every season? And skip across time so it could be placed into a pivotal role in every era?
Not a single time, not once, did the disco feel like just another ship in the fleet. It was always THE ship.
Season one is still the best IMO, with the disco being a secret research program hijacked by Lorca for his own purposes. The story felt right. But then the ship and crew just kept being extraordinary not just every season, but in every tiny moment.
I really love all the worldbuilding in Trek, but in disco that always played second fiddle to whatever crisis was going on, which the disco would then inevitably resolve. It was yawn-inducing to me.
Even as I adored lots of the small stuff the series did with the style, characters, and world.
Like Stamets!
Your comments put into words how I felt about the show. It was one major calamity after another. I might go back and finish because of Stamets, Culber (love Wilson Cruz), and everyone else.
I do like Strange New Worlds a lot. It is less frenetic
SNW has landed much more solidly for me, as well. I really hope it continues.
The most stinging part is Prodigy, the literal kid’s show, takes a similar story arc and doesn’t make it all about their special magic research ship.
Did the disco really have to save literal galaxy every season?
It really didn’t.
In Season 1 the only ‘save the galaxy’ thing is basically a one-off episode plot. Not unlike many other Treks.
Season 2, yeah. That flagrantly is save the galaxy.
Season 3, they are not saving the galaxy, they’re trying to help rebuild the Federation and its influence and uncover a scientific mystery. The Federation was crippled but existed and was at war with another group. Discovery shows up and is able to help with the use of a different perspective (a literal plot point) and new technology. The same thing happens in literally every Trek, it just switches sides on who has what tech. Enterprise was with basically everyone, SNW is the Gorn, TOS is the Klingons, TNG is the Romulans/Borg/Cardassians, DS9 is Cardassian/Dominion, PIC is Romulan Sect/Changelings/Borg, LD has the Pakleds and I’m sure that Prodigy has something as well. Haven’t started it yet. Either way, in all of them the primary ship that we follow becomes a primary plot point in the wars. The only one that doesn’t fit the mould is Voyager and that’s because they’re on their own but even then the show opens with Starfleet vs the Maquis.
Season 4, they’re trying to uncover another scientific mystery that is wreaking havoc in the galaxy. Personally i’d say it’s halfway there but not entirely. It’s more of a political season with seeing the internal struggles of the Federation. The ‘galaxy saving’ is a backdrop that’s set up for the inner aspects of the Federation being at odds with one another. It’s a representation of the struggle thats also within Burnham and all the crew members for being in a new place far from home. I honestly think that Season 4 is a work of art.
Season 5, saving the galaxy also isn’t a thing in this. Closest you can say is that they’re trying to save the Federation from being destroyed. Galaxy seems to be fine otherwise. But even then the season is more of a treasure hunt. A shitty one but still a treasure hunt.
Not a single time, not once, did the disco feel like just another ship in the fleet. It was always THE ship.
As opposed to any other show? As mentioned, every show features a primary ship that ends up solving the conflicts or being a MAJOR player in it. This feels like a really bizarre complaint. The four Enterprises we follow all feel like THE ship. Do they meet up with other ships? Sure, but they’re always the ones at the heart of the conflict and solving it. That’s… how shows work? It’s not like the new tech for Discovery is a big deal or not used as a constant plot point either. DS9 had the Defiant with a cloaking device that was heavily relied on. Why? Because that’s what they had. Discovery has a spore drive which is why it’s being used so much and why we follow it. Just like the Enterprise had its name or new path, Voyager had it’s stranded space and DS9 had a new quirky ship based around a space station.
I really love all the worldbuilding in Trek, but in disco that always played second fiddle to whatever crisis was going on, which the disco would then inevitably resolve.
… what?
I feel like you have completely missed the majority of what was happening on screen over the course of the show. The crisis is the second fiddle to the characters. It’s used as a vehicle to drive character development as opposed to having characters drive a crisis like in TNG or Voyager. Not that both didn’t have character development as well, but they were often static characters that were reacting to a new crisis each time. Discovery flipped the switch hard and went all in on serialization and character development. Every season the characters change and grow, so much so that they did a really shit flashback to what their characters were like about halfway through Season 5. The characters were fleshed out by the worldbuilding and they themselves fleshed it out.
In Season 1 and 2 they were relatively constrained about what they could world build but they still did their best. They expanded on the engagements with the Klingons (which annoyed some people but I enjoyed), expanded on Prime Pike for the first time since TOS, they finally gave Number One a name, they expanded on the childhood with Sarek that Spock had and his relationship with his human mother that he’s hinted at, expanded more on Section 31 and expanded further on the Terran Empire. They developed an entirely new race in Saru and developed a whole culture around him that stretches across multiple seasons. Then they went to the future where they have more free reign and went nuts with developing incredible looking ships and insane tech and new worlds and new empires and elaborating on cultures not seen since TNG.
How is any of that second fiddle when every bit of that expansion was the driving force of each season?
I see these complaints all the time and I don’t understand what y’all are talking about, especially when every other Trek show is guilty of the same ‘crimes’.
Maybe I can help you understand a bit where viewers like me are me coming from. I do see where people who really enjoy the show get it from, as they usually like it for the same reasons I do, but the stuff that for me kick me out of my immersion, just doesn’t for them.
How is any of that second fiddle when every bit of that expansion was the driving force of each season?
I mean, that stuff is the reason I like a lot of Discovery.
But world-building and character development isn’t just “going nuts” with expansion and imagination. All of that stuff, which there is a lot of, didn’t feel properly thought out and planned to me. It was a barrage of ideas, very few of which landed for me. I can’t even pull examples out of my head because it just didn’t stay with me.
You point out some of the good ones, and that’s the stuff I’m still begging for more of.
In my viewing, the only thing each season left me with really, was whatever big central plot element it had. So yes, the good ended up second fiddle to that. I would have preferred the show not work that way.
As mentioned, every show features a primary ship that ends up solving the conflicts or being a MAJOR player in it.
Another way to put it might be that other treks don’t make their main ships feel like an inanimate Mary Sue? Or not as much. I don’t mind the spore drive, I think it’s cool af (even as to this day I’m iffy on the in-universe science it canonizes). Obviously the main ship and cast of a trek will somehow be part of major events, but disco never pulled that off without feeling contrived as hell to me.
I think that’s why you see people comment this a lot. Discos writing has a “forced” tone to it that not everyone seems to notice. Perhaps best exemplified by the way characters will burst into tears way more than in most media. Makes me think of the Robot Devils criticism in futurama.
Even as the performances are competent, it’s such a blatant attempt to pull at the viewers heartstrings it made me frustrated and thereby unable to stay immersed in what the character was feeling. Like the Robot Devil, rather then remaining engrossed, “that makes me angry”. I can still see and appreciate the arc of the character, but the execution sabotages my ability to remain invested.
The same kind of thing would happen with where the ship was going, what would happen there, etc.
Again, overall, I enjoy the show. And while I know a lot of people suffer a similar experience to mine, I think the issues I run into when watching the show just don’t register for others. Like how you’re able to completely explain away my problems through the way you experience it.
I can totally see how the show would shine if you just rearrange the parts I experience as second fiddle into it’s primary appeal. I just can’t do that when watching the show.
It is kinda weird that it always seemed like THE ship while the shows with the enterprise didn’t really have that even though canonically the enterprise is THE (flag)ship. Or at least not as much.
Did the disco really have to save the literal galaxy every season?
Personally, I’m fine with this.
But if they are going to save the galaxy, make some real galaxy-sized problem.
To be fair, if I gave you a fleet of starships and one of them could just appear anywhere at any time, it would be THE ship.
Geordi is great. I love him.
I love a LOT of the characters on TNG, but I just found the story arcs it ended up telling very… Overblown.
Did the Enterprise-D really have to save the literal galaxy every season? And skip across time so it could be placed into a pivotal role in every era?
Not a single time, not once, did the Enterprise-D feel like just another ship in the fleet. It was always THE ship.
Seasons 3-4 are still the best IMO, with Picard being assimilated and liberated and wrestling with his new dual-identity as Locutus. Worf leaving Starfleet and being instrumental in Gowron’s ascension. The story felt right. But then the ship and crew just kept being extraordinary not just every season, but in every tiny moment.
I really love all the worldbuilding in Trek, but in TNG that always played second fiddle to whatever crisis was going on, which the ENT-D would then inevitably resolve. It was yawn-inducing to me.
Even as I adored lots of the small stuff the series did with the style, characters, and world.
Like Geordi!
I don’t really think that’s the same thing. The enterprise D was the flagship of the federation. It was THE ship and was given important mission, but it didn’t save the entire literal galaxy in it’s own. It had whacky adventure, did a lot of first contacts, fought important battles. But discovery single handedly solved galaxy level menaces and fought against entire alien fleets, all without very little help. That just doesn’t make any sense
I’m really sorry you didn’t enjoy everything about the series, but your subjective experience is what it is.
I won’t belittle it by superficially rehashing your words to apply them to something else.
Actually I really did enjoy both TNG and Disco. Very different approaches in storytelling (episodic vs serialized). But you seem like you wanted Disco to be more like Lower Decks—not the hero of the fleet/timeline, not the supership of the timeline.
Wanting something to be something else is truly the supreme recipe for disappointment and distracts from appreciation of what something is and actually is, for all its flaws and charms.
Ok.
So you’re saying I’m wrong to have watched it at all, should shut up, accept it wasn’t made for me, walk away and stop sharing opinions online?
If we really boil it down, I wanted discos writing to be less contrived, less forced in its emotional high points, and more consistent and restrained in its fantastical worldbuilding.
Well I would not have said it like that.
You’re shouting at the sky here; angry because it’s raining on what was supposed to be a sunny day. The writers aren’t listening to you or me or anyone else, and it’s already been filmed and published, so what’s the point? To inspire a reboot where everything is done differently? Or just for some catharsis?
The only way to win a game of “immovable object vs unstoppable force” is to not play at all.
It’s an Internet forum/meme post about Star Trek… shouting at the sky/into the void how you feel about the show is kind of the whole point. People get satisfaction and fulfillment from expressing themselves. That’s it, there doesn’t have to be a purpose or real world goal here. Where do you think you are? Standing outside the paramount lot watching someone bang on the windows pleading for someone to listen to them?
The point is to offer your opinion of a show in a public forum. Star Trek fans in particular have been doing this for over 30 years. Why is this such a problem for you?
Or just for some catharsis?
Yes. When it comes to communication on things that don’t actually significantly impact reality, such as governmental policy, was there ever any greater point than that? (Except for when fiction comments on things like governmental policy.)
The only way to win a game of “immovable object vs unstoppable force” is to not play at all.
The logical endpoint of that logic is both of us deleting our accounts and never interacting with others online again.
I don’t subscribe to it.
You’re right, and I apologize. I was kind of being a dick. Tough day, and it was unfair to take that out on the world. I respect your right to have and voice an opinion, and although my intent was not to squelch or suppress I acknowledge that that is the effect of my message.
I will leave my messages there, downvotes and mistake and all. Steel sharpens steel.
Did the Enterprise-D really have to save the literal galaxy every season?
It didn’t. And most of the episodes weren’t even aimed at the major historical events of the time.
It did participate on most historical events when they happened. And Q preferred to interact with it (what created some of those events). But it’s completely different from Discovery.
Ah, canon, or the word we use to describe which made-up story is more real than the other made-up stories!
Anything I personally don’t enjoy isn’t Canon.
Everybody got their own canon.
There isn’t just one canon.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a canon.
Can you canonize a saint with only one cannon or do you need a full battery firing all at once to make sure nobody misses?
Depends what the yield is set to on the photonic missiles.
You got canon, I have photon torpedoes 🫠
To me, canon is just all the parts I can remember. (With apologies to 1066 and All That!)
Ha! I love it.
Yeah, who cares what’s canon anymore? Next week they’ll make another prequel that’ll retcon the previous retcon to something else.
It’s nothing but prequels anyway.
They didn’t retcon anything though. They’ve only expanded. No lore was changed, only visuals.
A prequel is an automatic retcon. There will always be questions like “why didn’t they have that thing in the stories that take place afterwards?”
Besides, backstories are meant to be imagined by the audience. As soon as you decide to make a prequel you’re choosing to create cognitive dissonance for the fans. When people have to choose the backstory they imagined vs. the backstory somoene else came up with and put on the screen, people are going to choose the backstory they imagined.
Prequels are always bad for the fans, but the studios like them because it’s a lower barrier to entry for the non-fans.
So, no. They didn’t retcon anything. They expanded the lore. It isn’t a retcon to prove an assumption wrong. Moreover, prequels are always bad for fans? Opinion masking itself as fact. Worthless.
This has been my beef with new Star Trek. Too many damn prequels and nostalgia trips.
I just want a live action show with a new ship, a new crew, set post-DS9.
Yeah Star Trek Legacy is the show I want. Picard S3 was fun and all, and it restored the ending of TNG to be the way it should be, but I want to see new stories while checking in on some of the aftermath of DS9.
I mean, yeah. It’s important to know which works are sanctioned by the creator/owner of a fictional work.
Without that My Immortal is as much of a part of Harry Potter as the Prisoner of Azkaban.
it is though. You can’t own stories. You can own the right to sell books or whatever about them in a particular market at a particular time but that’s a legal contrivance.
Who’s myths are official and who’s non cannon? Are there fairy tales more cannonical than others? Which bits of Arthuriana are more real than the others?
Chant a dead language around whatever scrolls you like while wearing costumes but your ability to enforce some legal structure has no bearing on what is true.
Ebony D’Arkness Dementia Raven Way couldn’t have said it better herself.
Your argument falls flat when you take the wider audience into account. If some internet stranger writes a short story revealing that Sherlock Holmes was actually the Loch Ness monster all along, nobody gives a shit. If someone discovers an unpublished manuscript written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle before his death, his words have weight.
Fan fiction can do whatever bullshit it wants. The general public can, do, and should give greater respect to the people who created a story or those they handed their creation off too.
Don’t confuse audience reach with validity.
Seriously, why is completely fine for old stories to have multiple versions, some contradictory, with varying degrees of reach and all be considered just as much a part of the thing as any other but not that be the case for modern stories?
What about weird tales? All that wonderful pulpy SFF borrowed from each other and had varying degrees of consistency. We lump all of Lovecraft’s tales into a mythos, despite explicit links being rare. We also include those stories making reference to them because they’re just as much a part of the telling and retelling which made/makes them culturally significant. We don’t add all of Lovecraft’s work though as some definitely doesn’t feature in that mythos. It’s a frame for analysing some culture.
Old stories are muddied because they’re old. Authorship is lost to history.
More recent works can be attributed to individuals or groups. Saying that anyone can ape a recent work and their schlock is just as valid as the work of the original author (or authors) is insulting to the people who worked hard to create original works.
You want to make a work inspired by another piece of art? Go for it, people will probably respect you for doing that. That’s very, very different from writing some fan fic and screaming that your work is valid and you should be allowed to ride on someone else’s coattails.
You seem really worked up by this to the point you’re strawmanning me.
It’s culturally part of it, idk what tell you it’s just fact. Not authored by the same person, not having the same impact probably (although sometimes works by other authors outstrip the original), probably drivel, but valid all the same.
Any other approach leads to weird inconsistencies. Like who owns a character in a group effort? generally in our legal systems a company. That company can persist beyond the involvement of all the actual authors. It makes no sense to then later exclude work they do in their own time using the same characters or settings, or ones ‘legally distinct’ but obviously the same.
Even weirder when it’s one author who loses copyright but then writes ‘invalid’ fan work.
Nobody creates original works, all stories are based on other stories. Sure there are degrees of similarity but drawing lines is a messy thing that even in actual law (which is not trying to be logically coherent) it takes teams to arbitrate and only draws conclusions in self-reference.
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My Immortal
I had to search this one. Bad fanfic?
Regardless, they’re both just stories. It seems like that point gets lost anytime “canon” comes up.
They’re also some people’s livelihoods.
That’s all very fine and good, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China?
The “just stories” employ the publishing, television, film, and video game industries (plus ancillary industries that support them). I can’t even venture a guess as to how many thousands upon thousands of people feed their families on “just stories”.
The reason why canon matters is because it presents a single, unified creative direction for the fiction. In a world where canon does not matter anybody creating an unsanctioned work can steer the fiction in an unsustainable or downright bad direction, literally taking the food out of the mouths of families.
Distinguishing between official and unofficial narratives keeps the responsibility (and the risk) in the hands of the people who staked their livelihoods on it succeeding. Taking that control away from them just so people respect some lonely teenager’s shitty fan fiction is unconscionable.
Again, these are fictional stories. They’re not real. If you don’t understand that…I don’t know what I can do for you.
Again, it’s real money people pay to experience fictional stories. If you don’t understand that… I don’t know what I can do for you.
Modern Star Trek has its ups and downs. I’m just glad there’s so much of it. Discovery can have a weird National Treasure season, and Picard can have a bumpy Covid year, but there’s probably something interesting going on in Lower Decks or Strange New Worlds. (Or vice versa.)
I’m just happy characters like Stamets weren’t a one off experiment. It’s delightful to see queer folk continue to pop up in the main cast of other shows.
This analogy doesn’t work because Lower Decks never misses, making it the only star trek with no bad seasons
Lower Decks never misses unless you’re one of those folks with the Trek equivalent of the cilantro soap gene who just can’t get on board with an animated comedy show.
I have two opinions that have not changed since 2016:
First, Discovery, as Star Trek and as science fiction in general, is terrible. Great ideas destroyed by some of the worst writing and direction in the industry.
I will not be taking any questions.
And second, in spite of that, Paul Stamets as a character is one of my favorite in Star Trek. (After the shrooms mellowed him out, of course.)
I’m glad you’re sticking with your nick, it suits you and it’s a good one to have.
Probably unpopular opinion: I liked asshole Stamets. Nice Stamets is annoying.
Doesn’t hurt as much as LD confirming that Threshold wasn’t just Tom Paris’ fever dream.
LD takes sadistic pleasure in making sure to confirm all the worst episodes are canon.
Hell yeah dude!
All the characters in disco are amazing, it’s the main plot that gets ridiculous sometimes.
Don’t let bad writing ruin a great cast!
I mean i’m not a fan of the series as a whole but i’m absolutely here for psycho dwight harry mud
Hurts fans and disrespects canon. There’s a reason why it abbreviates so nicely to STD.
Yeah, DSC had some likeable moments and characters in a sea of mediocrity and poor producing. Mudd, Cpt Lorca, introducing SNW cast, etc and building off Roddenberry’s vision of representation. But yeah so much of it just felt like an assault on Trek. Like the producers hate it or something.
I loved Lorca. And actual fresh and yet completely believable military captain figure. And Jason Isaacs can act.
And then they ruined his character with a silly rug-pull and. making him turn out to be some generic, evil for the sake of being evil, space Hitler character.
I like a lot of the characters. I just dislike the plot and writing. Stamets fucks.
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i feel like the answer to what is and isn’t canon can be summed up with;
Why do the klingons look different?
They always looked like that, you just didn’t notice before.
Canon has always been squishy. The Eugenics Wars takes place in the nineteen-nineties… oh but didn’t Voyager’s crew visit our nineties? Plus, DISCO had that Elon Musk name drop.
…so the timeline floats up as the present day does. Canon is just a vague sense of the things everyone agrees on.
Personally,
I really dislike the fungus engine. You expect me to believe the Federation developed instant, consequence free warp but gave up on using it on literally any other ship? Silly. Very silly. Oh, but the precursor civilization doing a galaxy wide Genesis project is somehow an unimaginable technological feat.
And yes, I know STE covers the klingon flu. I just think They always looked like that was more elegant.
I liked the SNW temporal cold war explanation.
iirc klingons were uncomfortably bald in early disco
Well I haven’t even looked at it yet. The feedback of it from you guys is so bad I started deep space nine a second time before I went to discovery.
If you haven’t seen Babylon 5, give that a shot. It’s great. It’s gritty like the good episodes of ds9 with none of the fluff.
Thanks
It’s free on tubi
I really enjoyed most of Discovery. Especially all the genuine queer representation, that shit was overdue. And Michael is a hell of a character, great but flawed and so on.
I just wish the spore drive didn’t require the ship to spin around and make silly noises. That alone is responsible for a good 50% of the cringing I did while watching the series.
Doesn’t hold a candle to DS9 in most respects tho, which I started rewatching after getting two episodes into the final season of Discovery
AAaaargghh! Medical emergency!
Give me 20 units of TOS immediately
I’ll prescribe you 2 hours of Benjamin Sisko’s e nun ci ation. S.
Fine but I want a bottle of McCoy’s scotch with it.
I’m not a magician, Spock, just an old country doctor.
Indeed, doctor. Though I find this, “hooch” as you call it, quite . . fassinaler.
klunk
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Stamets. Both you and the character rock.
The first time I tried to watch D I wasn’t sure; but the second time through he has really grown on me.
You and the stuff you’ve said on here as well. You seem like a hoopy frood<3
Discovery isn’t for everyone but that’s fine. Not every Trek is going to hit you right. Not everyone is going to enjoy every piece of media. Some things are made for other groups of people. Discovery happens to fall in that category but it’s just as much a part of Trek as DS9 and TNG.
The Trek universe exists with so much diversity, from the people to the planets. Why can’t the shows?
is ‘deserve’ really the word you were going for here? I dont ‘deserve’ to enjoy DIS and that’s why I didn’t?
Yeah deserve isn’t the right word. I derped. Going to edit it to change the sentence entirely.
Yeah, the new version is what I assumed you meant. just wanted to make sure :D
Absolutely. I awkwardly worded that. I’ll just blame being stoned.
Disco certainly had it’s up and maybe a bit more downs, but it has some of the best characters. Stamets is great (so please keep the name), and so is Suru. And the relationship between Suru and Michael is one of Treks best imo. And once we got over the speed bumps, Stamets and Culver warmed my icy gay heart when they were on screen together. Tilly and Reno were also great characters.
