My reaction to the Star Trek: Discovery trailer.

It is… worrisome.

The basic problem here that I am having is that it appears that the lead character is reacting to events, not creating them.  I don’t recall Kirk, Sisko, or Janeway having this problem (Picard struggled with it a bit, and I didn’t watch enough to see whether Archer did).  Put it another way: at one point in that trailer you will see the commander of a Starfleet vessel pause dramatically and say “Run.” As Captain Kathryn Janeway herself might tell you, the proper response in a situation like this would be “Open fire.”

Still, maybe it won’t suck. Or maybe I’m just being cranky. I am, after all, outside of the target demographic these days.

8 thoughts on “My reaction to the Star Trek: Discovery trailer.”

  1. This returned home from the Abrams re-boot universe, but they’re still covered in grimdark and Lensflare!(tm). To be fair to your starship commander, skuttlebutt is that she starts out as a first officer and her development into leadership is an Official Story Arc. We shall see what comes of that.

  2. Once upon a time, I was greatly invested in the Trek universe. I cared deeply about what happened, and wanted the stories to be truly great.

    .

    Then… Voyager happened. And specifically, the episode where Tom Paris and Captain Janeway get turned into salamanders and have babies together. There had been bad Star Trek episodes before, but this one… well, something broke inside of me. I stopped caring quite so much about Star Trek, stopped being quite so obsessive about it.

    .

    My point is that these days, all I really ask out of Star Wars or Star Trek is that it not be awful. I know a lot of fans will disagree, but honestly, I’ve been happier after than before.

    1. It was DS9 that first wounded the Trekverse for me, and Voyager that killed it off. I have to admit that DS9 found itself later in the series, when it stopped trying to be a Babylon 5 ripoff. But that was a loooong way down the line. And the fact that the Federation could be eternally at war and yet convinced Starfleet could only be about exploration was starting to make me laugh.
      ***
      But Voyager was a mess. First to last. And I liked Mulgrew as an actress and the idea of Janeway. It simply was a poorly executed series, in every manner.

  3. Here’s the issue that I have. Did you ever see those leaked clips of the bits of Voyager they filmed with Genevive Bujold as Janeway? (For the non-Trekkies in here, Bujold was cast as Captain Janeway in Voyager. They filmed for a couple of days and at the end of every day, folks will go back and watch the footage to make sure that it turned out okay. In this case, it was realized that Bujold was not a good mesh for the role. Very quiet. Not emotional. Her responses seemed oddly detached from the other actors. The studio fired her and then rushed out and hired Kate Mulgrew who, despite her faults, can not be described as quiet and reserved in her portrayal.)
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    I get the same vibes from these teasers as I got from the Bujold stuff. The reactions I’m getting in the scene don’t match the reactions that I should be seeing. Even that Mudd cameo seems way off. Why is he a cackling supervillian now? I just don’t have very high hopes for this.

  4. Yeah, it’s grimdark/lensflare. And I can guess why, but man the Klingons don’t look right.

    Even so, I could make a series that I would want to watch, based on the trailer. Naive, ignorant executive officer responds to Klingon aggression by the book, and it’s exactly the wrong thing to do. And she tries to fix the war she’s set off, both by fighting Klingons and dealing with the hidebound Vulcans [and others] in Starfleet.

    I just don’t think there’s a chance in a million that’s the way it’s going to turn out.

  5. I get hints of, and nods toward, a lot of different things here. I’m seeing a little bit of Star Wars, a few dashes of Firefly, a healthy dollop of the BSG reboot, some tastes of Farscape with the humor surgically removed, and — intriguingly — a slice of the critically acclaimed and criminally underappreciated movie Sunshine.
    .
    The only thing I’m not seeing, sadly, is Star Trek.
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    I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it looks like the closest thing to Star Trek I’ll have to watch this fall, besides re-runs of the real thing, is The Orville — you know, that new Seth MacFarlane sci-fi comedy.

    1. Forgot to add: when Seth MacFarlane does Star Trek better than Star Trek does Star Trek, it’s time for everybody involved to either correct course or start saying things like “One-One-A,” “One-one-A-two-B,” and “One-B-two-B-three.”

  6. Just read an excerpt from the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly. I’m not going to post an excerpt, as it skirts close to the line, but oh, dear lord (and that’s used intentionally.) I can think of three instances in the show that contradict the writer off the top of my head, and they’re all from Rodenberry’s time.

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