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Solid series finale.

I was really happy with the way a lot of the pieces for the season came together and super happy that Ransom got to be Captain XD

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Still haven’t forgiven them for the Klingons doing K-Pop* rather than Klingon Opera.

As one who hasn't watched the series, I can only express my confusion to this in the form of a song...

How to respond?

Ah yes.

It cannot be...a Forgotten one! Look to your defences, Deathknight! Fight as you've never fought before!

Such a horror from the ancient times!

 AduroT wrote:
Strange New Worlds is Good, but sets up some hooks that it pulls too early, killing off interesting crew members and resolving character issues too suddenly.

SNW is Real Trek, but it does have some issues with pacing, consistent (in-universe) physics and such. Kinda just realized what it reminds me of - Dr. Who. There is always only The Current Plot and nothing else. But it has the soul of old Trek. It's gritty, but it's not cynical.

Lower Decks

We just finished this series, and we all enjoyed it tremendously. I’d put it after TNG and DS9 but before TOS and Voyager on my list of best Treks. It took me a while to warm up to it, though, as it carried the fine tradition of the rough first season.

Lower Decks felt a lot like The Orville to me for a few reasons. One of the biggest was the breezy feel each had due to using tropes and shorthand to move through plot elements quickly where other Treks would have spent half an episode building mystery or tension. They both also had that “you’ve met the best, now meet the rest” slobs-not-snobs quality to set them apart from other Trek shows. I think both series also took a while to find their footing and to make the characters funny without being annoying.

Lower Decks, even more than The Orville, fell prey to that comedy crutch the DBZA guys described wresting with their first year or two: when they didn’t have a handle on their characters or couldn’t find a funny way to bounce characters off each other they just made everyone a jerkass. Mariner and Boimler both spend a lot of time as unlikeable jerkasses. Even after they develop into better characters as the show found itself, they both still regressed into jerkassery again and again so the plot could happen. For me, this was the weakest part of the show.

For the most part, after the first season the jokes landed, the stories were compelling, the animation improved and most of the characters were fun to spend time with. I wish there were more Star Trek like Lower Decks.

I’d be willing to give it another try on the write up, especially as Good Trek tends to have a very dodgy first season.

But I just cannot stick the art style. Marry that to initially entirely unlikeable characters, and it just too high a barrier for me.

I'd encourage you to give it a go - like I've said earlier its the most Trek Trek thing that's come out under the Trek title for a LONG time. Give it a good chance its honestly worth it.

I have tried a few times. But the art style, specifically the horrific overemoting because animating facial expressions is like, hard, apparently, is just too much. Spesh as it means the voice actors have to overplay everything.

Like Rick & Morty, Family Guy, Ted, American Dad and that? It just feels smug. Which is exactly why I can’t be arsed with The Orville. Behold, as the writer and “creator*” just sort of stands there, awaiting his line and forgetting to act when someone else has a line.

*who brought us such genius as The Simpsons, But With Swearing, and The Simpsons, But With Swearing, Again. And of course, Star Trek, BUT WITH SWEARING AREN’T I ORIGINAL AND CLEVER.

Yeah there is (bleeped) swearing on Lower Decks…

I’d suggest skipping to the second season, where the animation is a bit better, if that would make a difference at all. There are a lot of great call backs and fanservice deep cuts that I think you would love, based on your appreciation of the recent Ghostbusters and Star Wars material.

Start of second season won't make much sense considering that there's a bunch of separation things that happen at the end of season 1.

I do agree most of that Rick and Morty/Family Guy stuff is a turn off for me as well. I can tolerate it when youtube offers it up in short clips but yeah never the interest to see it all the way through.

Lower Decks though is WAY different in tone.


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 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Yeah there is (bleeped) swearing on Lower Decks…

I’d suggest skipping to the second season, where the animation is a bit better, if that would make a difference at all. There are a lot of great call backs and fanservice deep cuts that I think you would love, based on your appreciation of the recent Ghostbusters and Star Wars material.

Honestly Lower Decks manages a very fine art of being able to take the more serious tone of TNG and DS9 and mix it with the more zany things that happened in Original series and the early part of TNG. And yeah its FULL of cutbacks and such to Trek. It really feels like an show written by honest fans who wanted to make more of the same of what they saw and loved. Rather than more recent attempts that kind of want to re-write it all

They also capture a lot of Voyager’s goofiness, although LD does it on purpose.


Hmmm. For MDG, I’d suggest starting with an episode like I, Excretus (or We’ll Always Have Tom Paris if the premise isn’t too silly) and moving forward for a few episodes to see if it works for him. He can always go back later if he gets into the series.

I’ll give it a spin. But I’m not promising anything.


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So….is there more to this than “hey, ‘member this episode that was written by competent writers, that wor grate weren’t it”?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ll give it a spin. But I’m not promising anything.


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So….is there more to this than “hey, ‘member this episode that was written by competent writers, that wor grate weren’t it”?

There is, but it takes a bit of watching. The premise of the show, as depicted in the first episode, is not to Boldly Go, but to follow up on those who did. The difference for me between LD and a purely member berry movie like Ghostbusters Afterlife, is LD takes the old things and develops them more or does something interesting with them, usually.

LD also has its own character arcs, its own stories and its own tropes that develop as the series progresses. I’ll put together a list of those kinds of episodes if you like. There are big payoff episodes for LD centric arcs, like the Stars at Night or A Few Badgeys More, or most of the Klingon episodes in the second half. I’d say, outside of the first season, LD has Klingon-focused episodes every bit as good as TNG and DS9.

One difference I appreciate between LD and the classic trek it builds on is it feels like they’ve learned from the old series. Rewatching TNG’s 5th and 6th season, there are a frustrating number of episodes where something weird happens and the crew don’t say anything because “I is the tired” or “They’ll think I’m crazy” or “There must be another explanation”. In LD, when a weird thing happens, an ensign tells the captain right away, and the captain calls the senior staff to the ready room to deal with the weird thing, just on the word of the ensign. The characters come across as almost blasé about energy beings, brain parasites, time travel, etc. because they or someone they know or respect has experienced it. For example, there’s an episode where a bunch of crewmen have a celebration for their ensign on his ascension day, when he will transcend the universe as a being of pure energy. There’s an episode about a character who came back from the dead and why it’s considered rude to ask about it. Both of those lead to one of the best running gags of the series and a season finale payoff that feels earned rather than like a deus ex Machina. Individual episodes build up and the series gets more interesting as it goes on.

Also, I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee is just good fun that takes a standard Trek trope (humans abducted into an alien menagerie) and just does something wacky with it.


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And the reason I picked I excretus, beyond it taking a fun poke at the memberberries (which I thought you would like) is because it leads into some more good episodes, rather than off-putting ones like An Embarrassent of Dooplers.

I have to say I do like that in Lower Decks they do acknowledge all the crazy stuff that happens to them in the setting. A lot of "alien of the week" that you get from Original series and TNG often suffers from the fact that it never really revisits or even really acknowledges anything much that happens in previous episodes.

TNG improves a lot, but even so there's a good many things that they almost seem to forget or overlook that have happened before.

It leads to fun things - much like how we have Sisko punching Q in DS9. He's read the reports, he's more than aware of what Q is (as far as Starfleet understands" and on what kind of creature he is and how you could or could not react to him being around.


Lower Decks really feels like their writing room was just full of DVDs of previous shows that the writers just watched back to back and picked up on so many of those abandoned stories and characters and themes and then they played with them.

The use of Pakleds, and our view into their government and revolutionaries, made good use of something TNG did that became embarrassing. The Voyager episode, too.

@MDG, if you have seen I excretus, I recommend moving on to Wej Duj and First First Contact. They’re good.

Nah. It’s not for me. Just not my style of comedy at all.

I vote we strap him down and use one of those eye-holding-open thing to force him through all the seasons!!

He’s going to miss out on some of Jeffrey Combs’s best work…

I can live with that.

I wasn't too sure about Lower Decks at first either, but once I watched an episode (at my brother's insistence) I fell in love with it. I won't call it the best Trek ever by a long shot, but it's also far from being the worst. And the crossover in season 2 of Strange New Worlds was fun, too.

The first few episodes are some of the show's roughest. It finds its feet a good way into S1 and then just gets better from there. Season 5 is not the high point of the series, but it does end before it overstays.

Section 31

Right, 24 minutes in, 70 to go. And. I. Am. So. Bored.

I think they’re going for an Oceans 11 feel. But the Oirish Vulcan that’s not actually a Vulcan but some tiny Oirish alien piloting a….Vulcan Skin Suit Robot thing is getting right on my pip.

No. Not Irish. The actor is South African. But his accent is deafeningly Oirish. Also, if you’re gonna pilot a Vulcan Skin Suit Robot thingy? Maybe act like a Vulcan? Oh wait, acting seemingly isn’t your strong suit, so maybe you just decided that’s how Vulcans are, or were convinced your giggling buffoon was actually you being all stoic and contemplative and that.

Michelle Yeoh is doing her best, but the material she’s working with? It’s like putting someone in a straight jacket in a sleeping bag, drawing the string, and then asking them to drag a medium sized boulder up a sheer and slippery slope.


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Nearly done, and it gets so, so much worse.

The action is all jump cuts. Which given Michelle Yeoh is an excellent martial artist, suggests an incompetent director. And it seems pretty obvious they’d film one strike, set up for the next, film that, then try and fail to edit it into a single, flowing punch up.

None of the other characters are remotely likable, and Georgiou, a bright light from Disco S1 is horribly inconsistent here.

Also, being a prequel of sorts? WE KNOW THE BAD GUY’S PLAN IS GOING TO FAIL.

Oh, and then right at the very end? The MacGuffin Device Of Dedly Deff? Has a biosignature lock. Which only Georgiou can access. So what was the bloody point? Seriously. Bad guy have device. But their main pursuer knows they can’t use it,

Stick this up your arse, Paramount. Michelle Yeoh deserves so much better than this.

I'm very okay with copaganda sucking...

Do Not Watch This.

It’s truly, utterly, iredeemably awful.

Oh, and apparently, one of the characters goes on to Captain the Enterprise C, in Yesterday’s Enterprise.

So they’ve taken a big ol’ Cleveland Steamer on TNG now.

In one respect, Section 31 is the most wholeheartedly faithful Star Trek production ever - if you count Galaxy Quest (AND WE DO), S31 is an odd-numbered film, and boy howdy did that suck.

It sucked more than a Jimmy Carr gig hosted in the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

Yes I know black holes don’t suck as such, just have incredibly strong gravity.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But the Oirish Vulcan that’s not actually a Vulcan but some tiny Oirish alien piloting a….Vulcan Skin Suit Robot thing is getting right on my pip.

So, they 'borrowed' this from the first Men in Black film?

Yeah.

And badly.

With a bloody terrible accent.

Look. This is me. You can tell this is crap. Because just as I’ll happily tuck in/utterly demolish a Haggis and other food others might baulk at? I’ve a stomach for often derided movies. For instance, I entirely, unironically, really enjoy The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, to the point of genuinely wondering what all the fuss about the latter is.

So when I’m telling you something is a dreadful pile of poopoo? You better believe it has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

I mean, I think I’ve made it clear what I think about Lower Decks. But hopefully I’ve not been a melt about it, expressing my distaste whilst not wanting to impinge on the next person’s enjoyment.

But if you enjoy this as someone familiar with Trek, never mind being a fan of Trek?

You need your bumps felt. With a patented, Grotsnik Corp Bump Feelerer 9,000.

The Grotsnik Corp Bump Feelerer 9,000. It only looks like several bricks crudely gaffer taped to a cricket bat.

Grotsnik Corp. Sorry, No Refunds.

Well it feels like it fits with the rest of Discovery. A lot of wasted potential.