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Old 09-25-2017, 12:15 PM
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Nate the Great Nate the Great is offline
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No spoilers, just reactions.

A Trek BBS forum thread discusses the pilot.

I realise it has been a while, but I can't think of any previous Trek show that had a 'knock it out of the park' first episode. Most are lacklustre at best, and suffer many of the same problems The Vulcan Hello does - expositional clunky dialogue, characters not quite set yet, variable acting depending on the scene.

The post goes on to describe the failures of the earlier pilots. My response: maybe this is okay when the public can watch subsequent episodes on TV for free, but if you want us to pay for this stuff-expend more effort getting the first episode right!

I think that brings up the overall problem with the episode. There seems like there was a lot of confusion behind the scenes about what they wanted to say and what they wanted to show. I think the "too many cooks" plays into that.

I've covered this before.

I think they made a big mistake setting the show in the prime universe because anyone familiar with the prime universe can clearly see that this does not fit in the prime universe.

The technology is way too advanced. And obviously the Klingons have been totally changed in appearance. When GR changed the appearance of the Klingons in TMP, he asked the audience to accept that they always looked like that, but didn't have the makeup in the 1960s. I always thought that was a fair explanation.

The TMP-24th century Klingons looked great. There's a difference between change by necessity and change for the sake of change.

They should have known better.

For me, this just didn't feel like Star Trek. I felt no optimism here. No sense that this was humanity at its finest. It was way too dark.

I can't see how this show would fit with Pike's Enterprise.

The amazing thing is that with very few tweaks, this show could have been set 100 years after Picard and most of these problems would be avoided.


Told you so.

And again

A few plot points and character arcs don't quite track, and some aspects of the show haven't gelled yet. The Klingons, who are dangerous enemies in this world, are very elaborately garbed and their scenes are often ponderous and too slow (the actors give their level best, but they labor under imposing facial prosthetics that make their expressions hard to read). Another complaint: The new Federation uniforms are terrible. Why give these capable officers panels of disco-friendly gold cloth on their hips?

When it comes to covering alien characters in layers of prosthetics, either stay away from the mouth enough so they can talk clearly, or dub over them later. I thought this was mastered decades ago! And someone else thinks the uniforms are awful, yippee!

And again

There are significant pacing issues, interrupting the action sequences with flashbacks and Klingon councils that are either unnecessary or linger too much on clunky world-building and dialogue.

You'd think after over seven hundred episodes these guys would have such silly skills as "pacing" and "editing" mastered.

Time for a positive review!

On first contact with the new series, it's clear CBS is planning to play it safe in terms of not contradicting all of the Star Trek history that came before it...

Ha ha ha ha!

Splitting the difference between commercial slickness and graphic novel solemnity, this Trek offers PG-13 violence, audience-pandering exposition dumps, cliffhanger endings, Game of Thrones-style pomp, and a touch of Lost's mystery box plotting, but also poker-faced musings on quantum science, moral relativism, logic vs. instinct, race vs. culture, and the military's tendency to corrupt science in service of war...

These are good things?

The Straight Dope forum weighs in

I enjoyed it but I think CBS did themselves a disservice by not airing Episodes one and two together as a combined two hour Pilot as I don't think Episode one alone sold the series or told the full story well enough. I was also a little sour because they delayed the streaming premiere to 8:48 pm to match the Football overrun on the network. That was dumb and annoying.

That's a good point: since when did Star Trek not air the full two hour pilot at once? You need two hours to introduce everyone and the setting, right?

I would have preferred the new Star Trek to just be "A ship full of interesting characters explores space".

I've remarked before that it looks like this show is just about a trinity, and the other guys are just living props.

Yes, the first episode seemed to focus heavily on some conflict on the bridge and had more action than you'd expect to see on an inaugural episode from this franchise, but it is WAY too soon for me to write this show off right out of the gate.

If you want the audience to spend money on this, then I would disagree with the "it gets better later" argument being valid. Discovery may well be better later, too bad every failure of the pilot lost you paying customers!

Another forum thread

One thing I'll be curious to see going forward is whether the series actually makes use of the time period. I'm not a fan at all of it taking place 10 years before Kirk, but they should at least utilize it; just replace Sarek with Tuvok and the klingons with mystery species X and you could set this 50 years after Voyager.

Where have I heard this before?

I'm quite surprised by the amount of continuity they've kept, right down to the Vulcan script in the testing pits. Someone in the art department knows their stuff.

It's a shame the continuity bug never reached the ship designers, or the uniform designers, or the set builders, or...
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Last edited by Nate the Great; 09-25-2017 at 01:01 PM.
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