Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Geeks explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
NÜTrek Part 2
As we navigate Star Trek through the cosmos, there's no shying away from the franchise's struggles with maintaining its canon and meeting fan expectations. From the portrayal of Starfleet officers to the ongoing saga of Section 31, we candidly express mixed feelings about the new era of Star Trek.
New Space, the sickest, illest space frontier. These are the misbegotten voyages of Not your Daddy's Enterprise. Its unending mission To explore strange new worlds through broken interpretations of the past. Through broken interpretations of the past, to seek out new lens, flares and stupid angel beams, to boorishly go where its betters have gone before. Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds.
Speaker 3:Are they in the proper approach pattern for today? Negative All the weapons Now Charge the lightning field one of the dumbest dumbest ways you could possibly do this, and not even in one of those like well, it happened, I can deal with it, but in a way that's like you made this as a throwaway because you didn't care about it and you knew it sucked, but then it retroactively ruins a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:That's the worst possible scenario well, I don't know if it ruined anything that wasn't already ruined before well, it didn't help. Let's say no no, but was there any help for that at that point?
Speaker 3:well, I'll kind of get to that because it really reinforces some of the, I will admit, probably controversial takes that I have in our first episode. But over the long term I've never been wrong, so we'll get to that. Oh yeah, this is Dispatch Ajax, by the way, roger, roger, oh yeah, this is Dispatch.
Speaker 2:Ajax, by the way, Roger Roger.
Speaker 3:Maybe it's more appropriate that you use shitty Star Wars.
Speaker 2:Mesa Klingon.
Speaker 3:Well, you know what? At least Discovery didn't do it that badly With Klingons. Take over the Terran Empire Do it Jar Jar Binks, maybe worse than anything that either Star Trek or Star Wars has ever done.
Speaker 2:Ooh, the worst either franchise has ever done.
Speaker 3:I think it might be because it's super racist. Yeah, it's cinematically and narratively bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's worse than the Trade Federation blockade guys who are also super racist.
Speaker 3:But they're not really characters and you don't see them all the time, and they're not portrayed as heroes, in a way, in fact, I'm sure you know this, but I mean, they're essentially just making fun of Newt Gingrich. Did you not know that?
Speaker 2:No, no, I don't think so.
Speaker 3:So the Trade Federation guys are literally George Lucas riffing on Newt Gingrich.
Speaker 2:There's a deep cut, Some nerd out there is like oh, it's this.
Speaker 3:But that's us.
Speaker 2:Okay, there are limits. I think everyone should have right.
Speaker 3:We take an academic and at least taste level approach.
Speaker 2:I mean, is there shitty things that I like, of course, yeah of course we all do knowing the name of's a trade federation. I think there's a definite yellow scare element 100% Orientalism. Yes.
Speaker 3:So the main ambassador to the trade federation's name is Newt Gunray. Oh, Newt Gunray.
Speaker 2:Alright, you know, I take back what I said. That's a good enough name that it should be remembered and thought of. I was wrong. You can point out. I was wrong, newt Gunray.
Speaker 3:This wasn't subtle, this wasn't like oh, you could read into this one way or another.
Speaker 2:Now I want to know who's the second in command.
Speaker 3:Oh, he's supposed to be. Trent Lott apparently Vice Roy. And, by the way, newt is obviously Newt Gingrich Gunray, an anagram for Reagan. Oh man, trying real hard, aren't?
Speaker 1:Gunray, an anagram for Reagan.
Speaker 3:Oh man trying real hard, aren't you, george? Where is Lawrence Kasdan? Please bring him back the Nemoidians that's it. Yeah, that would be. The equivalent is in Star Trek oh no, that's what they're called. They're the Nemoidians oh no, the Nemordians.
Speaker 2:Oh no, the Nemordian Royal Guard Rug Quornom.
Speaker 3:Do they have like a weird Mad Libs generator thing that they do in Star?
Speaker 2:Wars. A hundred percent, a hundred percent.
Speaker 3:They have to right.
Speaker 2:I think they have 20-sided die but they have letters on them and so they just roll it five or six times and they have to make a word from it.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, I was trying to find out the name of this other asshole and I went to the Wikipedia and I'm fucking drowning in Neimordian BS.
Speaker 3:Oh God, I honestly, and I don't know, I am curious as to which is worse Memory Alpha, which honestly I think is pretty well curated, which is the Star Trek fandom, wikipedia or Wookieepedia? I think Wookieepedia is probably worse.
Speaker 2:I would say yes, but one there's so many more fantasy elements. Two there's so much stuff that's kind of designed more for kids. Three there's so much more that has been relegated to non-canon, so it's all over the place.
Speaker 3:All of those combined elements are just making it that much more of an unmanageable beast yeah, I think the universes are equally as large, but I think the I think, with star trek at least, and probably because of the nature of the structure of star trek, it's wikipedia sources, memory alpha and memory, memory Alpha being canon and Memory Beta being tangential canon or non-canon, as opposed to Star Wars, which has Wikipedia, which is just the equivalent of driving down a highway with a gun, shooting it out of your window into the air.
Speaker 2:Huh, hey, here's a question for you what is Palpatine's first name?
Speaker 3:Sylvester? No, I have no idea.
Speaker 1:It's Sheev.
Speaker 2:Sheev Palpatine. I don't know how I never knew this until just now.
Speaker 3:I didn't know that either. Sheev Palpatine. I don't know how I never knew this until just now. I didn't know that either.
Speaker 2:Sheev Palpatine.
Speaker 3:It obviously only has to come from like a book or Paul, did you hear about this?
Speaker 2:Did you hear about Sheev?
Speaker 3:Believe it or not? No, I haven't.
Speaker 2:It's a weird and wild stuff.
Speaker 3:This Sheev Palpatine, God that's too old a reference for us. Weird and wild stuff, this She-Falc-Teen Hi-yo God, that's too old a reference for us let alone people that listen to us. Oh boy yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's the Viceroy, and then there's the Deuceroy.
Speaker 3:I don't think George Lucas came up with a lot of this stuff out of whole cloth.
Speaker 2:This stuff that is technical. At least the first image that pops up is a weird horse dude with an 80s Italian New Yorker haircut and a blue robe.
Speaker 3:That's probably canon, then right, how could it not be?
Speaker 2:It is fantasy land, so who knows, we're talking about Star Trek, new Trek, New Trek with umlauts. Rock on, I'm.
Speaker 3:Skip.
Speaker 2:What. And you're Jake oh yeah, I'm Deuce Roy Jake.
Speaker 3:You're Deuce, roy. I don't want us to have a hierarchy that defeats the purpose of the show.
Speaker 1:You don't want a hierarchy in the Trade Federation.
Speaker 3:The only reason that's not super racist is because you're mimicking the racist thing that they did. I'm. Thankfully, one of those guys was at least Brian Blessed, blessed B.
Speaker 2:Wait, the Gungan was alive.
Speaker 3:The Gungans are named after Gungaadin, one of the most racist movies ever made.
Speaker 2:It's like I wish they had the Mandingoans who were like.
Speaker 3:Who had seduced Amidala?
Speaker 2:How are we going to get the queen? Well, we have to get Space sweet, sweet back to go uh rescue her officially.
Speaker 3:The states of the podcast dispatch hx is not necessarily saying that george lucas is racist me such a saying that uh my headphones popped up.
Speaker 3:That was funny. Anyway. We last left off with the launch of star trek discovery in 2017. Discovery was meant to be a return to form for star trek. The abrams movies were, but they leaned away from Star Trek traditions like multiculturalism, diplomacy, plausible technobabble and procedure. Discovery was initially constructed by Brian Fuller, who had written for TNG and Voyager, and who conceived of the project as a prequel to the original series. Anyone who knew anything about the production of Discovery, or even just watched it, could tell it was fighting with itself and its audience as more and more showrunners and producers became involved. In the end, more than 20 producers would be credited on Discovery. Keep them coming.
Speaker 1:That is insanity Too many cooks, too many cooks.
Speaker 3:I almost wrote that into the script because I knew that's exactly what you were going to say Well it still holds up. That's the appropriate thing to say. It's just funny, because I was like. I thought that was like. I bet you, jake, didn't say that.
Speaker 2:Hey, I've got this asshole figured out. I know exactly what this piece of shit's going to say. Well, I would have said the same thing, and I know you very well, I think we should, as a sidebar for someone who hasn't seen Discovery.
Speaker 3:No, but I can.
Speaker 2:I think it's vital both to understanding what could have been what definitely turned out was, and then how it leads into what we'll talk about at the end of the show.
Speaker 3:Absolutely an exploration of what is commonly referred to as the lost era of star trek, which is the era that's not well defined or subtly hinted at before the original series. Well, so the it kind of depends. So before star trek enterprise came out, there was basically no history in Star Trek canon between well, really leading up to what we see in the original series. It wasn't until later that they kind of retroactively created history canon and it kind of started with the original series which you know talked about Trek's past, like the Romulan War. It wasn't until you get to TNG and second wave Star Trek, which talked about Trek's past, like the Romulan War. It wasn't until you get to TNG and second wave Star Trek that you get definitions of history, of the founding of the United Federation of Planets or Starfleet.
Speaker 3:I mean, you go back to early original series. It's real fast and loose. The UFP is kind of undefined. Early on they talk about United Earth. It was kind of a free for all because it was their first foray into this. There wasn't an established thing. A lot of writers just did what they did.
Speaker 2:They just adapted science fiction stories into Star Trek and so I mean, nobody knew they were writing stories that were supposed to last for the next 50 years.
Speaker 3:Or create an entire universe of backstory that they would have no idea for. So it didn't really happen until later on. So there are multiple points in Trek history that are considered lost periods of time.
Speaker 2:Because what Enterprise is like 100 years before Discovery and Discovery is 10 years before 10-ish years before the original series.
Speaker 3:yeah, Enterprise is more closely around 100 years before Discovery.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like 2151 and 2255 in Earth years.
Speaker 3:Yes, in the Julian calendar in Earth years.
Speaker 2:Julian Bashir calendar the.
Speaker 3:Julian calendar in Earth years. Julian Bashir calendar In the Julian Bashir calendar, the secretly genetically enhanced Julian Bashir calendar. So there are large periods of Trek history that they're trying to tell. And you know, at the time when Enterprise came out everyone kind of hated the idea and it was bad early on. It eventually got good crazily, but it talked about a very large swath of time that was never addressed, hinted at and then retroactively used in second wave star trek.
Speaker 3:But fuller's idea of discovery was that it was going to be set in the 23rd century because, just like people our age sci-fi, fantasy geeks of our era, that's where all the interesting things happen. But he wanted to create an anthology show that would start there, before what we know between Enterprise and the original and then eventually ending way far in the future stuff we don't know which. Conceptually I get. If you want to make a pitch of how to change Star Trek, I totally get what he's doing there, Good or not, I mean I get it. So Discovery happens in a period of Star Trek where there's not a lot of canon settled. Discovery takes place in a period right before the original series so that it would seem at least familiar to people who grew up on the original series, least familiar to people who grew up on the original series, but then address things that would feel familiar to people who grew up on tng or ds9 or voyager or even the abrams track.
Speaker 2:stuff makes sense I would say the things that they then trying to discover a new way to travel the galaxy. I think those are like there are three things in the first season that the show is kind of about.
Speaker 3:Yes, you're correct. Those are the three main things. Sort of philosophically they wanted to tackle more inclusion there was a lot of focus on LGBT visibility and diversity, which is at the heart of Trek philosophy. More representation, which is completely fair and really digs down into the heart of what Star Trek is. Unfortunately, that didn't really pan out to what Discovery was. Now, discovery does do those things, and I'll talk about the good things that Discovery does, because as much of a contrarian as I am to New Trek I am also not, you know, some internet troll who just hates everything. There are good things that come from New Trek, just like we talked about in Abrams' first Star Trek movie. So when we critique New Trek, it's more that, not that we're pessimists or nihilists or in any way, shape or form constantly being negative about it. It's that it doesn't live up to its potential and that's the disappointing part. It's not as good as it could or should be.
Speaker 3:Fuller's idea was, like I said, an anthology show. Each season was going to be set in a different time, starting with a prequel and ending way in the future. I mean he really had a modern take on it, like a True Detective or Fargo type take on it. He wanted each season to be different. The cast would be the only thing that was the same. So Fuller originally hired Gretchen Jayberg and Aaron Harberts to help him.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately, like we talked about before, in October CBS fired Fuller, replacing him with his underlings. By their own admission, they didn't really get Fuller's vision. That's a shame. So they dropped his more allegorical and complex story arcs. And if that first season feels weird and off, which it does, it's because everyone's working off of weird rough drafts of Fuller's vision which are incomplete and without the guidance of the person who envisioned it. So that's why you get weird stuff like the giant tardigrade or the Mycelian network, in general, things like that. Those elements which are Fuller ideas are in the show. Those elements which are fuller ideas are in the show, but what he was trying to say about them are not, because they didn't get it and so it feels odd and it doesn't work.
Speaker 3:It wasn't until like the last, I'd say, three or four episodes of the first season where I was like oh, okay, this actually might be good. Oh, the Mirror Universe okay, this actually might be good. Oh, the Mirror Universe Cool, this is awesome. So in between seasons one and two, cbs nearly cleaned house, but not Berg and Harbert's. They created a roadmap for season two and were working on one for season three. However, just the first episode of season two alone blew out their budget, and after episode one, cbs fired Berg and Harvards. They then replaced them with guess what? Alex Kurtzman what?
Speaker 1:Who saw that coming?
Speaker 3:And then for season three, Kurtzman promoted Michelle Paradise, which is an awesome name.
Speaker 2:She'll be up on stage here soon.
Speaker 3:Michelle Paradise coming on stage soon.
Speaker 1:The tan and lovely young lady from Miami.
Speaker 3:I don't want to disparage Michelle Paradise. There will be other names that we're going to make the exact same comment about later. So she became co-showrunner. A wide swath of Discovery's problems are really due to its behind-the-scenes chaos Writers attempting to make sense of groundwork that Fuller had made or his underlings had made, and then were fired and then starting over again. So it was from the get go at war with itself. Discovery felt like a lot of yes anding. Making Michael Burnham, which I appreciate the approach that Fuller took to Michael Burnham. When Fuller casted Seneca Green Martin, they put out an open casting call without race or gender or sex. They were like we took a name, a unisex name that isn't a common unisex name, and we're just going to cast the people we like White, male, black woman, cisgender, queer, doesn't matter Whomever which I think was a fantastic approach to it. But making Michael Burnham Spock's adopted sister is absurd.
Speaker 2:Which is something they highlight in the second season right at the beginning, when they introduce their Spock Ethan Peck.
Speaker 3:That's right Now. This is a big deal in the Kurtzman reign because before introducing Ethan Peck as Spock, you only had Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Kinto and it was unclear whether they were ever going to touch on recasting. There were people, legitimately and for good reason, wondering if Zachary Kinto was going to be Robin Ford. But, like I said, at that time there were confusing issues still up in the air about whether they could use actors from that, and if they did, would that be weird, that kind of thing. So they bit the bullet. They straight up recasted Spock with Ethan Pack.
Speaker 2:When he is introduced in season two. It may be one of those perfect new Trek elements, Because like this, ain't your daddy's spark right? Because he's like he's got a beard, he's emotional and he's distant and like the he's. What is it like? Searching for space angels?
Speaker 3:yes, the beard thing is a an aesthetic precedent set by dr mccoy in star trek, the motion picture. When in that movie mccoy is reactivated, he's retired initially and then is reactivated by kirk, sort of against his will, and he's got this giant awesome beard. So they were like we can do that for spock to show that he's not the normal spock we think of or whatever. And trust me, these kinds of precedents are going to become both understandable and yet hugely problematic and some of the biggest problems with the entirety of New Trek. So Michael Burnham is the adopted sister of Spock, as we find out. The adopted sister of Spock, as we find out. This is not without precedent in Star Trek, stemming from Star Trek V, the Final Frontier, which introduces Spock's half-brother, cybok.
Speaker 2:He's the latest unlockable in Mortal Kombat, yeah.
Speaker 3:DLC Spock.
Speaker 1:Cybok flawless victory.
Speaker 3:Harv Bennett and Leonard Nimoy tried very hard to make that character make sense, and so they talk about how he is a Vulcan who can mind meld but embraces emotion, which they do actually explore again in Star Trek Enterprise later on. Not the character, but that there are offshoots of Vulcans who reject logic, that are not Romulans. But the problem is that in the original series there is a precedent set that Spock doesn't have siblings. When we're introduced to Sarek, his father in Journey to Babel and in other episodes Spock doesn't have siblings, the caveat comes in because of semantics. Cyborg exists because it was never explicitly said that he didn't have a half brother he just didn't want to talk about it I don't want to talk he
Speaker 3:just didn't have a brother and so therefore, in discovery it's okay because he has an adopted sister, not a sister. Additionally, discovery began right at the beginning of a war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, which, by the way, in the show Michael Burnham causes directly. Star Trek danced away from talking the First Klingon War, and it's one of those things where you don't really need to know how and when and the details. You can do it if you're writing it well, it might work, but this doesn't do that. Then, on top of that, the Klingons don't look anything like fucking Klingons. They look like a completely different species. They're completely redesigned. But once again, there is a precedent for this as well.
Speaker 3:The updating of the Klingons look was eventually explained whether you think it's clever or cheap in Star Trek Enterprise, eventually explained whether you think it's clever or cheap in Star Trek Enterprise. I think it's great how they explain that, because what we think of Klingons, the way they look, came about in Star Trek the motion picture in the opening scene, actually with the cranial ridges and all that. Funny enough, the Klingon captain is played by Mark Leonard, who plays Sarek. They just wanted to update the look of Klingons. Totally makes sense, that's fine as you go along.
Speaker 3:There are questions that Trek people have because of long, intractable things we can't really go through right now. There's a question as to why Klingons look differently in the original series as they do in TNG. Enterprise goes out of their way to explain that in a retcon that crazily, in my opinion really works. So there is a precedent set for changing and updating how things I mean. Even in tng they they gave romulans cranial ridges in their own way. So you know they're going to update the way that aliens look and what have you?
Speaker 3:but, this was such a departure from that. It was so radical and so weird that it didn't really resonate with anybody, which actually will lead into something we're going to talk about later, about whether or not discovery is in canon, then, the most controversial and infamous feature of star trek discovery is the spore drive that the ship uses to essentially hop instantaneously from one point to another in the universe. Already, that is an insane thing to equip a ship with. If distance and speed and travel are all factors that you use within narratives, it's crazy to think that they could just instantly go from one place to another, and I think that right there really really really set them up for failure.
Speaker 3:In this, discovery is able to tap into an intradimensional mycelial network, because mycelial networks are something that were discovered, no pun intended, on Earth. The largest organism in the history of Earth is an enormous mycelial network, because they have all these conduits and things that connect them, creating one large organism or dependent organisms spanning hundreds of miles. There's a good X-Files episode about that. Actually, the guy that discovered this was a guy named Stamets, and in Discovery they use his full name as the name of their engineer who creates the Spore or at least knows how to use the Spore drive. You're not even trying at that point. Not only is it a flawed concept, I mean you could do it a one-off episode and I'd be like, oh, that's really, really interesting, but they don't. They start off as one of their three main things that Discovery hits.
Speaker 2:There's also the fact that if you introduce this way of traveling instantaneously throughout the entire universe? Pre-original series. You need to explain why this is never used, ever again. Yes, 100%, and they, I mean do they do that in the story? In a way, yes, it comes down to a question of ethics.
Speaker 3:Well, and they explain eventually that them entering the mycelial network is degrading and destroying.
Speaker 2:They do eventually say that that speaks to why they don't use it, but you have to speak to why the Dominion or the Borg or Romulans don't use it over the next two to three hundred years. There's a lot of races that aren't going to care. Do you think the Ferengi?
Speaker 3:are going to care. I know, and Earth was one of the last intragalactic society, one of the last species that developed warp technology. I appreciate Discovery for this point. The Klingons were in space centuries before the human race was. Romulans, vulcans. They were all in space way before humans were, so they knew all of it. They didn't discover it or, if they did, didn't use it.
Speaker 2:Right, and I get that. Maybe Discovery quote unquote discovered this new thing, but we're led to believe that nobody finds out about it ever again throughout the history of Star Trek.
Speaker 3:And they go out of their way. And this isn't the only example in the show, but one of the examples in the show where they do this, they explain that retroactively.
Speaker 2:Forget Star Trek, it's bad narrative, storytelling narrative storytelling, and I mean, it's not that this is unprecedented in the history of Star Trek? How many times do they easily travel back in time or jump in between universes? If you can do these things easily, which they can when they want to, when it's narratively convenient, what's to stop it from happening all the time?
Speaker 3:To your point. This kind of thing has indeed been explored before Transwarp Drive, for instance in the movies and then later in Voyager In Star Trek 3,. Transwarp Drive was supposed to be the new thing that the Excelsior was going to be the flagship. The Excelsior was going to be the new flagship of the Federation and it was going to be the ship that used Transwarp Drive. Scotty sabotaged it so it didn't work and then they kind of dropped it. If you read some of the later non-canon tech manuals and what have you, they explain some of that stuff but seemingly off-screen.
Speaker 3:Transwarp was abandoned for not being ready for implementation in Starfleet vessels, for implementation in Starfleet vessels. Later it was explained that the regular warp scale that we know was simply rescaled to account for tapping into Transwarp speeds. So for instance, warp 9 on the original Enterprise, which was like the highest it could possibly go, warp 8 in the original series was considered its max. Warp 9 was like Back to the Future 3, when they're pumping all that crazy shit into the coal engine of the train car to get it up to 88 miles an hour. So like Warp 9 on the original Enterprise was more like Warp 6 or 7 on the Enterprise D. This actually worked because of the fast and loose writing in the original series, where the ship did definitely surpass warp 9 to much higher numbers not a lot, but a few occasions. That is until transwarp was reimagined by the borg. Instead of the ship generating like a transwarp field or whatever, that actually just became like a normal warp field that you would see in the next generation. Actual transwarp was redefined as a regular warp ship who could follow along a permanently established transwarp tunnel. It's like the difference between warp and Stargate. But Voyager destroyed all that stuff. They literally destroyed the Borg. Transwarp destroyed the Borg transport. That's how you could explain that.
Speaker 3:In Next Generation, q flung the Enterprise far across the galaxy to the Delta Quadrant to encounter the Borg. And then all of the sudden the Borg show up in, honestly, the greatest arc of TNG Best of Both Worlds. They just show up and kidnap Picard and turn him into Locutus, even though they should be hundreds of years away. They just do that. It's because they have transwarp conduits that they have developed that they're starting to build. Then later in another episode of TNG, the Soliton wave propulsion system was abandoned completely. It was an idea where they would have this space or whatever they would shoot this wave of radiation that whatever target starship would ride on like a surfer and then achieve exponential and infinite velocity without using traditional warp technology. But in that episode they completely abandon it due to it being extremely hazardous and nearly impossible to control. Then they have the graviton catapult in Voyager, the quantum slipstream drive. Voyager alone did this like a thousand times.
Speaker 3:There are tons of different versions of Propulsion that aren't just traditional warp that they address and then hand wave I mean sometimes to its benefit. Sometimes it's a really cool arc that really does well to impact the narrative storytelling of whatever show. Like in TNG it was discovered that even good old regular warp was wearing out the fabric of space time. In that episode a standard was set for a good chunk of time where Federation ships weren't allowed to go over warp five unless given specific sign off by Starfleet command. So after that happens in season, I want to say it's either five or six through the rest of the series. That's interesting.
Speaker 3:You've introduced something new that has lasting impact, that isn't just hand waved away. Then you had Voyager, or Voyager flung into the Delta Quadrant by, by the way, another weird propulsion system or teleport system or what have you 75,000 light years into the Delta Quadrant and would take roughly what a coincidence 75 years to get home. They from the setup of that series. That ship was said to have a maximum cruising speed of warp 9.75. That's not even the dumbest part. Voyager just hand waved away the damage to the space-time continuum by I don't know fixing it. I guess I guess they made like a quantum catalytic converter or whatever and they solved the problem. Even in the press releases before the series I remember reading and they were like oh, oh, yeah, well, we fixed that problem.
Speaker 1:Well, I guess Warp's fine, now again Right?
Speaker 3:I guess. And while they ditched this intriguing idea, discovery essentially wrote themselves into a corner by having to do essentially the same thing with the Spore Drive. They couldn't keep using it because it was destroying the network and yada, yada yada. They had to explain that, not because the way that they used the drive caused all sorts of logical problems like we talked about, but because it was a writing problem. It was a concept problem. Then they did it again by going into the future and finding that there was very little dilithium left when they skipped way into the future One of those things that they cherry picked from Brian Fuller's concept and they find out that the Federation has fallen apart. Nobody can travel very far. They're essentially at the same level. We are now where it takes forever to get from one planet to another because dilithium is way more rare than it used to be. And wait till you hear why that is.
Speaker 3:In that future, the spore drive seems invaluable. You gotta use it then, right, they've already explained that you can't use it. So their backtracking made it useless. So they once again no pun intended discovered an even newer form of drive called the pathway drive that didn't use dilithium and you could seamlessly move from the pathway drive to regular warp back and forth to lessen the use of whatever dilithium is left. It just seems like so much in Discovery you're constantly not only starting out, filling in gaps, but then, when you do bad things or do dumb writing, retconning those or retroactively explaining those things while filling in gaps. It just feels like this confusing head-snapping mess. Okay, let's get into the technical part of that and we won't exclusively be technical about it. But this is what happens with the dilithium when they go into the future. Okay, in the year 3064, a ship embarked on a mission to investigate a dilithium nursery. What?
Speaker 2:So like Don't bother.
Speaker 3:Okay, fine, I'm going to use that in quotes the Verubin Nebula. During this mission, the ship crashed on a planet called Theta Zeta, a planet composed mostly of dilithium. It's somehow an M-class planet. So the ship was kelpie, a race that was introduced in discovery, something that you would think you would have heard about already. But whatever, if you want to retroactively introduce species, I don't care. So one of the kelpian crew members, dr isa, was pregnant. Oh, you're gonna love this. This is such a like a bad dc or marvel plot. Dr isa was pregnant and gave birth to her son sukkal.
Speaker 3:Sukkal's cells acclimatized in utero to the dilithium. What, developing a existential connection to it. What, yeah? Knowing that she and her crewmates were dying, isa created an elaborate hollow program designed to educate and nurture. Nurture Sakal and mask the crew's condition from him, because they were apparently dying of radiation poisoning within the nebula. Traumatized when he saw his mother die of radiation poisoning, resulting in an emotional outburst that caused a subspace shockwave that destabilized dilithium, causing it to suddenly become inert throughout the galaxy. What and because? Dilithium, of course, is used as the catalyst for matter-antimatter reaction utilization. Any ship that used dilithium suddenly had inert dilithium and antimatter blew up the ship. So billions of people died, which included all of the Klingon Empire, the Federation, not the Romulans, if you're doing it right.
Speaker 1:And I'll get to that.
Speaker 3:And so in the future, when Discovery's there, they find out that Federation is basically like two planets. You know, if you don't have faster than light speed, good luck, you're not getting anywhere. So Vulcans, who now are isolated from the rest of the Federation, just like Andoria and Tellar and all the other founding members, they're all now on their own. That's when Vulcan and Romulans reunite, like Spock tried to do, and they become a new species. They tried working on a different form of propulsion called SB-19, but it doesn't work and they just drop it. But this, on top of what we were already talking about being a huge problem for a thousand reasons, doesn't work because Romulans don't use dilithium for their faster-than-light travel. Romulans use something else, as set up in not just TNG, but in going back to the original series. They use an artificially created quantum singularity which doesn't require dilithium. So why wouldn't the Romulans just have taken over or gone on a humanitarian quest to help everyone else out within the Alphen Beta Quadrants? Why did suddenly the Romulans forget what they use? It'd also be really nice if you had that red matter right about now. Right, if you use a quantum singularity. If one tiny droplet of red matter creates an enormous singularity, decalithium, be damned. If you already had all that enormous quantity of red matter, why couldn't you use a billionth of that tiny droplet to power every faster than light drive in the galaxy? And they never address that, they just go. I guess I don't know the reasons why. Obviously most of it is behind the scenes stuff producers, showrunners, yada yada yada. Technical reasons be damned, I mean those are big, especially for Trek fans, but I mean it never works. It speeds through huge events too quickly while others get really drawn out. Characters are always super in panic mode. They do basic lip service to the actual sci-fi elements. One of the vital errors of Discovery was its deliberate and intentional rejection of episodic storytelling, and not in the way that DS9 did. Discovery is clunky and awkward like Michael's arcs. Even pedestrian ones feel forced or strained.
Speaker 3:Star Trek is arguably a procedural drama. Formalism is how it works. It's about solving mysteries, conflicts or disasters. From infrastructure of a hierarchical workplace, the crew each brings specialized skills and actions that are orchestrated by the maestros in the chain of command. The power dynamics negotiate the inputs of different experts in different departments, all working together to solve complex sci-fi dilemmas how a captain or a commander treats or defers to their crew is a common and narrative theme across the entire franchise, and watching gifted, extraordinary people do their jobs is a big part of the appeal of the procedurals. It's about the methodology of people as limited and small as we are, in the face of wonder of the unknown, achieving the impossible and, hopefully, the just. That's what's fun about watching it.
Speaker 3:In its attempt to focus on action, discovery would often forego the classic cerebral approach and leaned into violence. To solve problems, they just shoot first. The melodrama is nearly tangible. It basically leaks off the screen, but resolutions are rarely satisfying. In the second season, discovery teleports from here to there, from hither to yon, to investigate a series of mysterious signals left behind by a time traveler in the form of an angel from human myth. Oh god, that's where you introduce spock, but in the initial of an angel from human myth.
Speaker 3:Oh God, that's where you introduce Spock. But in the initial premise of that season they're like there are seven signals that we have to investigate. They don't get to them. They get to like three. They don't even bother to find all seven signals. It's so frenetic and weirdly stilted back and forth that it doesn't finish its own stories. At the end of the second season the showrunners invented a wise conceit that explained away why the Discovery spore drive and also they use holographic communications instead of just on screen. It's something that was introduced.
Speaker 2:Deep Space Nine.
Speaker 3:Discovery has that all the time. The Klingons use it all the time. What are you talking about? When they finally introduce Pike in Discovery, they do a whole thing where the Enterprise shows up, which is honestly, personally my favorite physical interpretation of the original series Enterprise. He's like I don't like that shit. It doesn't really seem to work. Tear it all out, that's it. And so humans don't discover it again for another 150 years or whatever what, what well?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's consistently a problem when they're doing all of these prequel series. Where you're, you have all this tech that just doesn't fit. You're adding all this stuff that doesn't work in the continuity that you've built.
Speaker 3:I agree and I've thought about different ways to sort of like retcon why certain things work like, why a communicator is used in. You know, we have cell phones, we have touchscreen cell phones. Why is a communicator not have, like, a visual component? Why is it the way it is? And I always rationalized it by saying like, well, this isn't a cellular phone, this is subspace communication. It's different and it does change and evolve as it goes. Fine, Okay, I can suspend that amount of disbelief, but when you're introducing things that were already talked about as being introduced in the future and using them now doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Honestly, one of the reasons that Strange New Worlds technically a spinoff of Discovery, which follows Captain Pike in the years before the original series Captain Pike, of course, being the original captain in the original unaired pilot of Star Trek, the Cage that show finally feels like Star Trek. Why? Because they made episodic episodes, because they have bottle episodes, Because they have arcs that work. They just straight up finally made a real prequel to the original series and it's good.
Speaker 3:It's so good, it's such a good show it works, and it's because of their complete rejection of Discovery that that's even possible. But as to one of our original questions, is Star Trek discovery in canon? Yeah, it is. Can't have strange new worlds without discovery, and the arguments about whether or not it's in canon specifically come from the last episode of the best show that new trek has to offer lower decks. They are flying through an anomaly. Hey, look at that, it's not a lightning storm in space.
Speaker 3:Lower Decks is, at its heart, a comedy and a satire of Star Trek, but in a way that works. It's like the opposite of the Star Wars Christmas special. It's poking fun at it, it's making it lighthearted and family-friendly, but in a way that adheres to the rules, while making fun of the rules of Star Trek canon. And so in their last episode they're flying through a Heisenberg anomaly, which means that they're just like I don't know. Anything can happen. And in it there is a moment where they are being pursued by a Klingon ship and the Klingons turn into the Discovery, which is a signal to the audience in detractors' minds, that the Discovery Klingons are not in our universe, they are not in our continuity, they are in fact separate. That is literally the only reason that people now think discovery is not in canon okay that is not the case.
Speaker 3:I mean, I watched it and I was like that'd be great because that means it's not in canon. I laughed at that. I thought that would be the case. It's not. If you really go back and you look at the logic of how everything works, discovery is in, and especially since New Trek keeps on rolling. With Kurtzman baby, Starfleet Academy is coming out soon, set in the 32nd or 33rd century, Literally a spinoff of Star Trek Discovery, starring Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti throwing hands up in the air. No clue. But if you remember, Paul Giamatti played Rhino in Amazing Spider-Man 2, written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orsi.
Speaker 2:Well, if this lets him do good projects like holdovers, which is fantastic, yeah, do the shitty sci-fi comic book stuff so that you can finance good movies, by all means.
Speaker 3:Sure, it turns out. Actually, paul Giamatti, also, coincidentally, huge Star Trek fan, always wanted to be in Star Trek, like other famous people, like Michael Jordan, for instance, wanted to play a Klingon. It didn't work out. He was supposed to be in an episode of Voyager but that contractually didn't work out. James Worthy, former Laker, plays a Klingon in TNG. You know there are plenty of guys that are like oh, I love Star Trek, I just want to be in it and weirdly, most of them want to play klingons. So yes, discovery is in canon and there are more new trek discovery spinoffs coming, but we haven't talked about star trek picard yet and we won't get into a whole breakdown about it, about the show in general, because we don't have the time. And it's man, it's a baffling weird show. I'm confused as to why so many people hate Discovery and complain about this, mostly complain about Discovery but don't complain as much about Picard, which suffers from the exact same problem.
Speaker 2:Do you want my initial gut reaction?
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Because they like TNG. And this is TNG people with some sprinkling of Voyager-ness in there, and it's a new package of their old tasty treat.
Speaker 3:Well, not if you watch the first two seasons of Picard.
Speaker 2:I think you're.
Speaker 3:There's almost no TNG references in that show until season three, they visit Breiker Indiana.
Speaker 3:Yes, they do do things like that, but until season three, where they bring them all back, they get the band back together. The first season of Picard diverged from traditional Trek storytelling. This is probably the first show that Kurtzman was on the ground floor of creating, that Kurtzman was on the ground floor of creating. It diverged from traditional Trek storytelling largely due to the direct input of Patrick Stewart. He agreed to come back if he had oversight of the narrative, which, as it turns out, he's not great at, and this is a strange parallel, but I've thought about this for years. He strangely followed the Shatner arc where Jonathan Frakes, who plays William Riker, became a very successful director on his own outside of Star Trek and Patrick Stewart eventually became a director of episodes of TNG. It seems like because and Frakes was the only one LeVar Burton also started directing episodes and other projects and you go on to Voyager and you get several cast members that become TV directors, and all that following the Frank's path. But it almost feels like when Shatner took on Star Trek 5, when Patrick Stewart was like well, I want to be a director now and well, I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna have my input. But we like Patrick Stewart because he's not a narcissistic fuckface. Later, showrunner Terry Metallus commented on this Quote.
Speaker 3:There's actually many, many different versions of season two. I think you can kind of feel when you watch season two that there's a lot of different ideas here. We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like no, we don't really understand this, it's a little bit too sci-fi. It's a little bit too. In star trek there were romulans, there was a whole thing, the idea that gynon's bar was presented as a normal bar in los angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through a telephone booth and that was rick's cafe and it was a stopping point for different species that were actually there on earth with a do not interfere thing happening. So you had a lot more star trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at the time were like this is too much, but there were some really cool ideas there that were pretty cool, oh, nailed. Therefore, season two was a mess. There were cool concepts sprinkled throughout, finally explaining the Wesley Crusher thing, because that was something that they completely did not explain with his weird cameo in Star Trek Nemesis.
Speaker 3:One of the show's complaints was that it was too dark, to the extent that episode four of season three was literally too dark to see. There were multiple times that the official streaming releases of certain episodes had horrible issues with color correction. Quoting Metellus, again on Twitter, quote we are trying to fix this bizarre technical error for a second time. If you can't wait, I encourage you to watch it a second time when it looks right later. They physically couldn't get the show to look right. Picard woke up to an unfamiliar present where there is no United Federation of Planets but instead an evil colonial Terran empire. Does that sound familiar?
Speaker 2:And we didn't even get into that. With Discovery, well, we touched on it a little, but not much.
Speaker 3:Don't get excited. This isn't the Mirror Universe, but an alternate timeline where everyone is just evil. In it. An increasingly senile cue then sends picard back in time to show the importance of his family line in shaping trek history. The series made dumb decisions like running into gynon on Earth in the 20th century where she owned a bar at number 10 Forward Street.
Speaker 2:Oh, I get it, that's cool.
Speaker 3:In the tradition you could make the same argument you made last time, a valid argument as devil's advocate for the term Sawbones. I get that the fact that Guinan runs 10 Forward aboard the USS Enterprise-D but this is beyond the pale In the tradition of maritime ships. Sometimes areas on ships have specific familiar names and sometimes their names are simply descriptions of their location. So like I don't know 6 aft whatever On the Enterprise-D, it was deck 10 forward of the ship. That's why it was called 10 forward. And sure you can make the whole same Sawbones argument. Except audiences didn't seem to have any problems with terms like port or starboard, or the influence of former crewman of the frigate USS WS Sims, ronald Moore, or former Navy man Gene Roddenberry, when DS9 used the term promenade to refer to the civilian and commercial thoroughfare aboard the station, or when DS9's original Starfleet ships were called runabouts. These are all naval terms. Why do you have to reinvent the wheel again? There was no reason to even include that. But in any event, let's talk about Section 31.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 3:So Star Trek, Section 31, and I did some research on this that I think you're going to love.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Star Trek, section 31,. The movie, the motion picture the 2B original. It might as well be, it actually might have been better. Well, no, I watched five minutes of a movie called Amityville in Space last night, which is a 2B original, and I've definitely, sadly put this above that.
Speaker 2:I bet the plots are fairly as in-depth.
Speaker 3:It was directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi.
Speaker 1:Osunsanmi.
Speaker 2:That's a tough one, but I think I got it mostly right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and written by Craig Sweeney Not to be confused with-.
Speaker 1:DB Fair.
Speaker 3:Oh sorry, Of Strange Luck. That's funny. I should have thought of that Fire in the Sky, which you find terrifying, but also not to be confused with Craig Sweeney, the Australian rugby union player, or Craig Sweeney, the Welsh child sex offender.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 3:Just so that we're clear. Sweeney, who apparently actively trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Speaker 2:We will have nothing bad to say about Craig Sweeney. Please leave us alone, do not choke us out.
Speaker 3:I'm just saying this is a fact.
Speaker 2:Please do not give our addresses out so that he can break our arms.
Speaker 3:And he also served as writer for shows like the 4400, medium and Elementary, which is the BS American version of Stephen Moffat's Sherlock, and also Star Trek Discovery, and he also produced the film with his company Action this Day Exclamation mark For Paramount+. This is not a theatrically released movie. This is a direct-to-streaming film. It is the first television film in all of Star Trek, technically the 14th film overall, but it's part of Alex Kerfman's expanded Star Trek universe. The film is set in the franchise's lost era between and this is how it's defined in the official synopsis this doesn't come from me Star Trek, the, the original series films and the next generation. Huh, what that doesn't. It follows Philippa Georgiou as she works with Section 31, a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the UFP. Blah, blah, blah. We talked about that. She's reprising her role from Discovery, so development on a spinoff series was confirmed in January 2019, but production was shut down by COVID-19. A different Discovery spinoff, strange New Worlds, was then prioritized, so full speed ahead.
Speaker 2:They made the right choice.
Speaker 3:COVID-19 did something great, so instead this was developed into a throwaway standalone film. Picture it Terran Empire, mirror Universe, 23rd century.
Speaker 2:Do I have to? Well, I did, because I watched it.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately, yeah, a teenage, philippa Georgiou, returns home from a deadly contest to determine the next emperor.
Speaker 2:Yay, game of Thrones, I mean, yeah, that makes no sense. Why would you do Hunger Games to decide who's going to rule the empire?
Speaker 3:And even Hunger Games. She's not the one in power. I don't get this at all. And on top of that, they keep calling Earth Terra. No, no, no. In the Mirror Universe they call it Earth. It's Earth. It's called the Terra in the Empire because they're a united human species. They call them Earthers. Later, as a derogator, she reveals to her family that she has befriended a boy named San, and they defeated the other young contestants together To claim the throne. Georgiou cuts all ties to her previous life by poisoning her family. Imperial officials then beam down and they arrive with San, who didn't kill his family. Georgiou then scars and enslaves him as she ascends to the throne.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, yeah, which makes sense, mm-hmm, yep.
Speaker 3:Then it fast-forwards to the early 24th century.
Speaker 2:Yes, Isn't like 2324? I think 2324 is when they say it happens, right, isn't that when Section 31 occurs? That would make no sense, though. 2324 is when they say it happens right, isn't that when Section 31 occurs?
Speaker 3:That would make no sense, though, because Georgiou first comes over from the Mirror Universe in like 2250-something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I don't know. How is she?
Speaker 3:I'm sorry, even if that is the case, bullshit. Because when it opens up in their stupid I don't know, like their casino house of ill repute, pretty revolution, cuba thing, they have going on there, the guy, the attendant, her concierge or whatever, is Charon, charon, the planet, the entire species died in the original series, except for this guy.
Speaker 2:And apparently, because of the way he's painted, he would be part of the royalty, but he escaped to be the concierge of Space Vegas.
Speaker 3:Space Vegas an actual thing for Buck Rogers TV show. This is what I was getting at with the last episode. You're just doing references for references sake. It doesn't even matter how accurate they are, if they make sense.
Speaker 2:Okay, Every single character that we see in this movie strong quotes. None of them make sense. No, Not a one. Not a one.
Speaker 3:No, they're garbage.
Speaker 2:Let's move along so we can get to all of these point by point, before we shove this thing up the rest of our hole.
Speaker 3:So the rest of the IMF crew? I guess that we're putting it's.
Speaker 2:Mission in Suicide of the Galaxy.
Speaker 3:At least in Mission Impossible they always avoided dirty work and they just facilitated it.
Speaker 2:This one they just do it, yeah, except that they wave their fingers and say, no, we shouldn't do it. But they do.
Speaker 3:As a caveat to being like. Well, I guess we're Star Trek, we have to include those characters too. It's not a Star Trek movie, it just includes Star Trek characters, which are, by the way, section 31 Agent Olak Sehar Mel, who is a Delton, a race originally introduced in Star Trek. The Motion Picture in the form of Lieutenant Ilea, played by former Indian beauty pageant winner, persis Kambada, who, despite my mother's insistence that she was briefly married to William Shatner, was not so. She was married to actor Cliff Taylor. Then, in 1989, rui Saldana, a former-.
Speaker 2:You're going off on a tangent, my friend.
Speaker 3:No, I'm doing this very much on purpose. All right, rui Saldana, a former field hockey player who represented Great Britain in the 1972 Summer Olympics. Their wedding ceremony took place at the Polk County Courthouse in Des Moines, iowa. What, why? Where Saldana worked as an insurance salesman for a branch of New York Life. What, interestingly, she was romantically linked in the interim there to publicist Edward Losey, ted Kennedy, indian actors Adi Irani and Salman Khan. Not at the same time, though that would be spicy Maybe. Then she supposedly had at least a one night stand, no judgment, with Rutger Hauer, and then someone I wouldn't have guessed in a bajillion years until I remembered what I had learned about him. Wild guess Anyone in the world Left field.
Speaker 1:Just tell me.
Speaker 3:War criminal and infamous poonhound Henry Kissinger. What A character named Quasi, played by very funny actor Sam Richardson from I Think you Should Leave and Veep.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Who is a shape-shifting Kamaloid, a species first introduced in Star Trek VI and played by model and David Bowie spouse Iman?
Speaker 2:Rattle through the rest of the characters real quick, and then I want to hit each of these for a reason.
Speaker 3:Then Zeph, user of a mechanical exoskeleton, rachel Garrett, a no-nonsense Starfleet officer in there to keep them in line, and future captain, by the way, of the uss enterprise c, who eventually dies. Funny enough, in an alternate timeline, fuzz, a microscopic nanokin by this is george lucas, who pilots a robotic suit that looks like a vulcan, and they intercept an arms dealer who turns out to be from the mirror universe with the ultimate weapon or whatever right. So that's where we are all right.
Speaker 2:So our leader here is alok, who apparently was a genetically modified like con.
Speaker 3:No, apparently he was a pow of the eugenics. But then they. But then retroactively modified right.
Speaker 2:They turned him into a super soldier for some reason.
Speaker 3:This woman, who is-?
Speaker 2:This woman that we don't know, which I'm guessing-.
Speaker 3:Who's not Khan, but one of the other warlords.
Speaker 2:Again, every bit of this is a setup for a series that will never happen.
Speaker 3:Ever, ever happen, thankfully.
Speaker 2:Okay, I guess we'll just roll with it. His character makes, I guess, the most sense of all of these. I guess the most sense of all of these, I guess there's quasi again Sam. Richardson probably the most enjoyable part of this movie just because he's an enjoyable funny actor.
Speaker 3:I would love to see a Star Trek show with him in it, but not this.
Speaker 2:Again. You said he's a camealoid. You see him doing things working for the Federation pre-Next Generation. A why are there not more of these around doing all types of things? Because this would be extremely valuable. B not that long after this, in the grand scheme of the timeline, there's an entire war, the Dominion War against changelings shapeshifters similar to a camelloid, which are framed as I don't know know, one of the scariest species in the in the galaxy. Unique, extremely unique. Now I understand that camelloids are essentially kind of a big batch of tubes like the internet, yeah uh, who can take any form.
Speaker 2:But again, do you know anything of where? Why? Nope, this is just like hey, this is a fun thing to put in there. So let's not think about the large ramifications of these creatures in the totality of space or what they could do all you know is that they have michael jackson thriller eyes yeah, they got green cat looking eyes, the only thing that sets them apart, but they don't always have them right well, they, well, they shapeshift.
Speaker 3:So no, I mean, they do, naturally, but but naturally they're big thing-o tubes.
Speaker 2:They're a tubular organism.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's not really very clearly defined or explained.
Speaker 2:No, as opposed to the stupid miniature guys. For the founders or the shapeshifters, the changelings, whatever you'd like to call them in DS9, there aren't many of them. No, okay, they're rare. It's a very rare thing. I'm assuming camelloids are also rare, but if you were a camelloid, why are you? Doing this? Why are you doing this? Why are you not doing bigger and better things, things. Why are you not like grand scale espionage?
Speaker 2:that doesn't make any sense it super doesn't, and it's very annoying. Zef, who is in love with his biomechanical cyborg suit which is a very anti-star trek type extremely anti-star trek type of thing.
Speaker 3:He is the muscle of this team yeah, it's a cyberpunk type of thing and also worthless character.
Speaker 2:He's a fucking dime store borg wannabe.
Speaker 3:He did it to himself because he thought it was cool.
Speaker 2:He's just a bro. There must be a larger segment of the populace throughout the galaxy that has this kind of thing, but we've never seen it before.
Speaker 3:You would imagine, sure, okay, not everybody's in the Federation and not everybody adheres to Federation law and things like that. So, yeah, there'd be people with like enhancements and, like they do, mechanical arms or whatever. Sure, but there's nothing to this character.
Speaker 2:No, besides the fact that he doesn't feel like a Star Trek character, it doesn't really work in the grander scheme of Star Trek. No, this Like a Star Trek character. It doesn't really work in the grander scheme of Star Trek, no.
Speaker 3:This character just sucked.
Speaker 2:What does he do? Makes quips.
Speaker 3:In fact, he dies like right off the bat, and then they accuse him of being the mole or whatever. How is he the most advanced one and then just dies.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's get to Fuzz.
Speaker 3:Oh God which? This is the thing that Lucas tried to do in his original treatment for the sequels. The wills that micro universe you?
Speaker 2:remember all that?
Speaker 3:no, I don't remember that they reference it in rogue one. The sequels were going to take place in a tiny micro universe, so stupid. Now you have advanced android. Yes, surrogates Like what is this.
Speaker 2:There is something that is Okay. It's much more advanced than data as an android body.
Speaker 3:It doesn't have the brain, no.
Speaker 2:He's just a chasis. I get it, but you can't tell the difference from a biologic entity in any way, shape or form. I mean it bleeds. So it is a biologic cybernetic organism.
Speaker 3:Right which already what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this isn't something that happens. Obviously there's more of them. We see another one at the end of the film.
Speaker 3:He has a really, really thick Irish accent.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:To the extent where, when he keeps saying Vulcan, I thought he was saying Vulcan because I'm like is that different? Like what is that I? I mean, he's obviously supposed to look vulcan and be vulcan, but you're like what are you saying? And then when they introduced the second one at the end he's got the absolute worst american southern accent, like a kentucky accent, for no reason because it's funny, because I'm a different one.
Speaker 3:As, as dumb as it is, it would have been more clear and better if he had just been wearing like a 10-gallon hat when he showed up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have the spurs on. Have your ass with chaps, do the whole thing.
Speaker 3:It made less sense that all of a sudden he's got the worst American Southern accent I've ever heard.
Speaker 2:I don't understand these beings. I don't understand how they function in.
Speaker 3:Star Trek. It's a Gerard Butler level bad accent. It's baffling.
Speaker 2:This just doesn't work. Whoever thought this was a good idea is just wrong.
Speaker 3:It feels like a fan fiction that should never have. That somebody should have read and then just never thought about ever again. But they make a movie out of it. What are you doing? What is this?
Speaker 2:Well, they make a feature length pilot. Or like cramming all the elements of a first season into 90 minutes.
Speaker 3:I'm sure that's how all of them retroactively justify it that it's like well, we were going to have a whole show, but we had to cram it in there. Well, it wasn't going to be good from the get go no, it wasn't going to be good from the get-go no it wasn't going to be good anyway, and maybe you could have explained some of these things through you know, 20 episodes. Yeah, like Discovery did.
Speaker 2:It's a non-starter when you don't have the time, money or effort to do any of those things properly.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Then just don't do it.
Speaker 3:Don't do it.
Speaker 3:Just don't do it when they canceled the series. Why didn't they take that time? Because it was like literally five years between when they announced the series and when this movie came out. Why didn't you take that time to look at this and go that's probably not very good. Was it a contractual obligation with Michelle Yeoh? Was it because Michelle Yeoh won Oscars recently? I mean, which I get. You want to make sure you have Michelle Yeoh on your roster. You want to give Star Trek legitimacy in that sense? Sure, I get that, Put her in something else. Man, Don't do this, Even if it's like well, I wanted to keep Sam Richardson too. Sure, I get that, Put him in something else.
Speaker 2:But it's also like you have this character and I guess this is supposed to be. I mean, if you listen to them talk about it, it's like oh, this is a vehicle for redemption. No, this fucking isn't. The whole story is a genocidal madwoman who then gets stuck in this universe, is bored being a billionaire ne'er-do-well, decides to team up with this ragtag band of starfleet outsiders.
Speaker 3:After 80 plus years. Yeah, yeah. What? And she doesn't age.
Speaker 2:Okay, if you want to explain that she has modifications or whatever, you can technobabble your way through that, I don't really care.
Speaker 2:But they don't, they don't Whatever. I'm totally going to hand wave all of that Because I mean, in the first place, it's hard to figure out where all of this stuff happens in relation to each other in the first place. Yeah, without getting online and like well, when did this happen? What's the timeline here? I would have no idea, so you just roll with it. Who cares? But she had created this super weapon. A oh God, do we need another one of those? B it's this box that essentially just wipes out planet by planet. The idea was, I guess, that if things ever went bad, she was just going to eradicate all life.
Speaker 3:Good call.
Speaker 2:For what reason it's not even a deterrent.
Speaker 3:If that character had this technology, developed this technology, had the ability to use it, why wouldn't she have just used it to conquer more worlds? It's presented in that San, her best friend throughout the Hunger Games that she subjugates, helps, I guess, spearhead the project, or at least is the go-between between the scientists that develop it and then give it to her. He fakes his death, saying that like this is so bad that even the people that developed this killed themselves. And now I'm gonna kill myself because this is such a bad weapon, which you wrote that better. You could make a really interesting commentary on oppenheimer and the atomic weapon, whatever what sci-fi is designed to do. But they don't.
Speaker 2:And so he kills himself and then he gives her this weapon and then she's like well, now I don't want it because you died yeah, while he's planning his secret mission to then go to where she is and wipe out all life there, that takes again we're gonna guesstimate 90 years to do almost a century. It's not like she's doing anything with these people, why activate?
Speaker 1:I don't.
Speaker 3:What is the point? One thing that we are missing. So she thought she destroyed it Already. That was done. We addressed that, but it wasn't actually destroyed, it was squirreled away.
Speaker 3:That part makes kind of sense, where people are like, well, maybe I can use this as leverage later, and some enterprising dude no pun intended stole it, managed to somehow figure out how to get to the, the prime universe, and then a hole in space, obviously yeah, lightning storm and then try and, I guess, sell it, but it's the most powerful thing in the universe and he's just like selling it to random people and doesn't have any yeah, in space vegas he's like I'm just gonna sell it to some guy in space vegas not the romulans, not, not the Klingons, not whomever he traveled from.
Speaker 2:a whole nother universe to then just go to space Vegas and find someone in the wanted ads who was like looking for a deadly weapon.
Speaker 3:He found it in the penny saver and was like I'm going to sell it to this asshole on Craigslist. And then San somehow finds out.
Speaker 2:Has he been tracking it? Because if he could have been tracking it, why didn't he just take it before this?
Speaker 3:Why did it take a century to do so?
Speaker 2:What was the point of all of that? And then, what is the point of him having that weapon? Because they say that he's going to bring the Terran Empire into this universe. Well, what's the point of the weapon then?
Speaker 3:Other than getting the team together, what is the point of the MacGuffin the?
Speaker 2:weapon, then, other than getting the team, together.
Speaker 3:What is the point of the mcguffin? There's none. Just like the arms dealer dude from the mirror universe says oh, eventually they were going to figure out how to get into our universe. And it's weird that when they go to it, at the end they go to the place where that happens and apparently it just happens all the time. You just go in and out, yeah, it's just a hole. Even though it took 80 years or whatever for him to figure that out, he literally says, eventually he's going to figure it out and like, okay, that's some serious hand waving there, by the way. And then so yeah, then he's going to come in and they're going to invade our universe. That right there interesting.
Speaker 2:If you have to stop a secret invasion from another universe.
Speaker 3:Yes, that's fascinating, that would be interesting. This doesn't even care about that. Yes, that's fascinating, that would be interesting. This doesn't even care about that. No, it's almost an afterthought, even though it is technically the plot, not the MacGuffin, not the reason they're all getting together.
Speaker 2:This movie isn't about her realizing what she did wrong and how she murdered billions of people and maybe she shouldn't do that or trying to make up with San, the guy that she thought killed herself and that she had a relationship with I don't know 150 years ago 9,000 years ago.
Speaker 3:It really doesn't matter at that point. It doesn't matter no.
Speaker 2:She has found this weapon that is hers and I guess she doesn't want used, but really she just wants it for herself to keep.
Speaker 3:The whole thing was that even what they say in the press, when they went on the fucking Today, when Michelle Yeoh went on the Today Show and when Alice Kurtzman talked about this publicly, like all their press stuff, was like oh yeah, it's a show about redemption, it's about you know, realizing what you've done wrong. In the movie they say it like a ton of times. That's how they recruit her to be the overarching story for george. Oh, but it turns out that she felt so badly about this weapon that she created that she destroyed it, or had it destroyed quote-unquote because if her best friend in the world who she scarred and subjugated, by the way, yeah killed himself, then she was more obsessed with having it, not using it, having it, and that what she regrets, not the fact that she was a murderous authoritarian, but that she didn't get to keep this thing which she now has.
Speaker 2:They don't send it through.
Speaker 3:They don't send it back to the mirror universe.
Speaker 2:They sew up the hole, all right. The rest of the movie plays out. They're trying to find out who has this mega weapon space box doohickey. It's a madcap adventure.
Speaker 3:But there's a traitor in it, it's fine. Whatever that part is, whatever yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a 2B original Whatever. And then they have a chase, multiple chases, and then a garbage scout catches up with this super ship and uses magic lassos to trap it so that it can't get to the hole in space.
Speaker 3:I barely remember that it's so bad that way.
Speaker 2:It's funny because I was just thinking as I was saying all this. That man, I hope he remembers what happened in the last 30 minutes, because it was a slog to get through and I just kind of drifted off. Yeah, me too. Because there's nothing to hold on to. There's not a single character. There's not a single character. There's not a single dramatic action, there's not a single action piece, there's no direction, there's no writing, anything to keep me involved in this mistake of a movie.
Speaker 3:It's not even that long, it's like an hour and a half. The third act is a wasteland. The third act is a wasteland.
Speaker 2:It felt very much like we don't know how to get from point A to point B, to point C, to the end. I don't know, let's just skip it. Let's just skip it, let's just do it. Let's not explain anything, let's not build any dramatic tension, let's not get into characters, let's just throw it out there. We'll figure it out in post.
Speaker 3:If the people in the Mirror Universe are fundamentally evil or they just live in an evil situation. If you want to figure out which is which, that's something. At least that's a plot. Now, ds9 already addressed a lot of that stuff. But if you want to make it a commentary about that, fine, that you can be redeemed in this universe in a different circumstance or what have you. But they don't even do that. They pretend they do. It's almost like they were desperately looking for that when they talk about this movie publicly, but it doesn't really happen.
Speaker 2:No, I think there was an outline for a series that that was the goal that this would be a redemption arc for Philip Georgiou and that she would come. Goal that this would be a redemption arc for Philip Georgiou and that she would come out on the other side a different person, benefactors to society, utilizing all her skills and abilities and know-how to really put the Federation, taking a step forward for the galaxy. But that's not what this movie is and that's not what this movie is about and that's not what this movie does.
Speaker 3:No, and even if even if you take this ostensibly, you would imagine, is the consolidation of that series right, that series doesn't extrapolate out to that either you would still, at the end of that series, be where you're in, discovery why that didn't make any sense. Why did we stay here this whole time? This doesn't really make sense. Let's say, you filled in a lot of these gaps with actual character building and pathos and stuff like that. Even at the end, that doesn't equal to what they're saying it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2:No, what are you going to say? This is a film that we didn't really intend to make. That was supposed to be, you know many, many hours longer as a series. We didn't really know what to do with these characters, and so we put a lot of action set pieces that we didn't really know how to shoot and we just kind of tried to jazz up in post and we just kind of ramshackled a weak pilot into a film and put it out. We hope you guys like it. What's it about Stopping space weapon with friendship?
Speaker 3:Not even that. They kill each other constantly and none of them trust each other. There's no like redemption for that either.
Speaker 2:Well, by the end, the Starfleet officer isn't there just to stop them from killing people. She's a loose cannon too. She's just like them.
Speaker 3:Oh, she's a Kirk-like or Pike-like or.
Speaker 2:Right, because you can't have just an actual straight-laced captain.
Speaker 3:Like in Star Trek Generation, yeah, where Cameron was the captain of the Enterprise.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You can have just a guy who's good at what he does be the captain. That's fine. You don't have to all be Jim Kirk. Robert, april wasn't Jim Kirk, picard's not Jim Kirk.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. What's the least rule-breaking captain?
Speaker 3:Well, I would say Jellicoe, the guy that took over the-.
Speaker 2:Is that a?
Speaker 3:cat. He was in fact in the cat's universe. Cockroaches are huge. You can unzip your own skin.
Speaker 2:What they want to be is Jellicoe, who's a space cat captain. That's what you're trying to get to at the end.
Speaker 3:The mischievous Skimbleshanks is there.
Speaker 2:He's a Romulan.
Speaker 3:Well, technically, Idris Elba is the villain in Star Trek Beyond.
Speaker 2:What was he in Beyond?
Speaker 3:He was the main villain, I know but what race was he?
Speaker 2:Oh, he was human, he was just human.
Speaker 3:Okay, human, he was mutated by this macguffin they had at the beginning that they don't really quite explain very well. Even though as many complaints about that movie as I have which technically is in this new direct thing but we haven't talked about because not directed by abrams and not written by kurtzman and orsi, written instead by simon pegg I would take that movie over most of this other shit in a heartbeat.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's just better. They get the characters more and Simon Pegg seems to have put a lot of work into understanding it and he's the Star Wars guy. I don't hate Star Trek Beyond. I think it's way better than Into Darkness by far, and it's a decent follow-up to the first one.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think, if you're just looking by rotten tomatoes, as it were, it's a slugfest between Section 31 and Star Trek V, the Final Frontier, which is the worst film of all Star Trek.
Speaker 3:That's almost exactly what I said before, except I would also throw Into Darkness in there If I had to, let's say, go from bottom up, worst Section 31,. And then it's a toss up between Into Darkness and Star Trek V. Into Darkness is just a mess. It's a toss-up between into darkness and star trek 5. Into darkness is just a mess. It's a fucking mess. And this feels like that, but worse, but made for tv, what we used to call made for tv now just made for streaming made for streaming instead to be original is what we call those now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in summation, yes, technically, discovery is in canon. Canon, however, is now a complete shit show, but it doesn't mean it can't be redeemed. In fact, recently, and only based on comments by alex kurtzman himself, when asked recently about another star trek movie, he said that's not up to me. So apparently that experiment has sort of run its course.
Speaker 2:You mean just the same way that Nu Metal ran its course?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's a shame because even in the New Trek era there were some great writers they brought up. Michael Chabon was a writer in Picard. There were good things, there were good elements, there were really interesting things I do like and things that I think if the writing or the overall concept had been better, would have been an awesome follow up to second wave Star Trek. But it's a bit of a mess. The reason that it keeps going in its current form, because in old, traditional network television this would have been gone. There would have been none of this. But according to Paramount and CBS, the Star Trek franchise in general since the inception of streaming has brought $2.6 billion in in revenue.
Speaker 2:How are they?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I don't know. It's just like Netflix they don't know. I mean, you would imagine it would just have to be subscriptions, but that doesn't make any sense. There's no logic to that.
Speaker 2:No, and you can't quantify.
Speaker 3:Oh, these people came in because maybe they came in to watch football or soccer or survivor, or they specifically said, just star trek. That's hard to define because also later on, when discovery was on, they would eventually start showing those episodes on network tv as well, which included ad revenue from traditional network stuff Nielsen ratings, things like that. So I would be more willing to listen to CBS Paramount's breakdown of that than I would any numbers Netflix ever throws out. I still don't know how accurate that is or what metrics they're using, but either way, before New Trek it used to be that Star Trek movies happened because the official position of Paramount was Star Trek movies never lose money, even if they're niche, even if they don't have a wide audience. They have small budgets or even medium to larger sized budgets, and they will always make that money back. So they're still going to make them and they're still going to do it. So I don't know, new Trek isn't going to kill Trek. It's despite itself succeeding and we're going to get more of it.
Speaker 2:It's a crapshoot, like going into a space hole.
Speaker 3:Or space Vegas With spacecrafts. But to answer everyone's questions yes, discovery isn't canon. Section 31 sucks. That's all you need to know.
Speaker 1:Woof yeah.
Speaker 3:And scene.
Speaker 2:Oh God, well, we did see it and you guys heard it. Don't tell me, you didn't hear it, I was there.
Speaker 3:Finally. I saw it happen. We saw that happen. Don't tell us it didn't happen.
Speaker 2:Well, if you guys would like us to tell you that it didn't happen another time, please like share, subscribe, which we will. That's what our next episode will be about, I'm sure, if you wouldn't mind, like sharing, subscribe. Like I just said, do rate us Five space anomalies the electrical space holes of the podcast universe.
Speaker 3:Captain, there's a plot hole ahead.
Speaker 2:We're going to run right through it On whatever podcast app you're interested in, ideally on whatever podcast app you trust, ideally Apple Podcast. Hey, take a look at us on YouTube. If that's a way you'd like to listen to pods, we are on there. It's an easy way to get to us. And, you know, let other Trekker, trekheads, new Metal gods, whoever might be interested in hearing about this, send it their way. And hey, just thanks for hanging out with us for a bit as we chat some Trek, along with all the other nerdy, geeky, weird topics we might chat about next time. Just happy to have you along for the ride.
Speaker 3:We didn't even talk about the cameo at the end of Section 31. No, and we're not going to because she's lost it.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter Go back to the Yo Play commercials.
Speaker 1:My lady, we're glad you had your award.
Speaker 2:You killed Michael, that's it.
Speaker 3:No thanks, done with it. No thanks. The perfect end to a perfect movie is what that was, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, Skip, and Till we come to a perfect ending.
Speaker 1:What should they do?
Speaker 3:And if we have to watch Sex and the 31st again soon, until then they should probably clean up after themselves to some sort of a reasonable degree. Make sure they tip their KJs, their bartenders, their podcasters, their bar staff. Make sure they have support of their local comic shops and retailers. And from Dispatch Ajax we would like to say Godspeed, fair wizards. That's all you need to know.
Speaker 2:That's all you needed to know.
Speaker 3:Please go away.