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If you love [Star Trek] you must hate [Star Trek]
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A lot of y’all love DS9—which is fine!—but it has some of the goofiest and laziest “look mom, I’m an alien!” looks in all of Trek, and I’d never bring that up as a reason to slag the show. I think the design for Trills, especially, is bottom barrel “I did my homework on the bus on the way to school” level of creativity, and it does nothing to make me like Jadzia Dax any less because she’s a great character being portrayed by a capable actress on a show with a limited budget. It is what it is. The TOS Klingons didn’t even have prosthetics, and we all just rolled with it.
"Worf, do you look like your great-grandfather?"
"Not even remotely."
Nah, that’s not a criticism, friend, that’s a preference, and they ain’t the same
I mean you say they need to accept the limitations of the setting. They self-evidently don't. And that's a good thing, because there's enough "canon" floating around in Trek to choke a horse.
They can do whatever they want.
Me, I dig the new Klingon look, I don't care why it changed, and I do also wish the actors could talk through the makeup.I'd also prefer that they changed back over to TOS Klingons, personally, but whatever, it's *not important*.
Now some of the stories are a hot mess (and I love them for it a bit sometimes), but that's a whole other thing.
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In general I'm more soft on Disco Klingons than most of the fanbase, but there's a few things that make you ask....why? Why did they made them all bald when the manes were so popular and iconic? Why did they put Blue colors on the ships, having a similar color pallet as Fed ships just looks cheap:
And I like those designs...on STO, where I can change the colors as I wish.
It's one of those things about Disco I find so frustrating, why make your life so much harder recreating the Klingon race? For most of my adult life it's been nearly impossible to get a Star Trek show to fully work, or even just be decent. It feels like putting an artificial handicap on yourself.
They weren’t bald, they ritualistically shaved their heads, this was explained in the show
And that does not matter, because is something the Disco writers decided to do, and it was an unpopular choice. What I think is that it was dumb and unpleasing, but that's separate.
Again, that’s not a criticism! It’s a preference!
Attack a thing for what it is, not what you wish it was
I agree with the ideal of trying to take media on its own terms, but drawing a line between preferences and criticism—to me—implies the possibility of objective criticism. Which I don’t believe is actually possible.
(That said, before I end up on the side of an argument I don’t believe in, I should say that Discovery’s Klingon redesign doesn’t actually bother me, personally. I just reject the notion that any change is inherently a good artistic choice just because a writer explained it.)
I’m thinking I might just go SNW (really liked the first 2 episodes) and jump straight to S3 of Disco.
I guarantee you that people had this conversation about the shift from TOS to TNG Klingons (they did), and I really wish I could care this much about what is essentially an aesthetic choice.
Did it land for everyone? No. Oh well.
I imagine they'll roll on to the next design next time we see a Klingon.
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It was a slog. Apparently S3/4 are better. But I got burned by 1&2 (and 2 is only saved by Mount and Peck being great). But...still better than Picard 1,2 and maybe 3. That show was shiiiiiiiiiit.
Although the Klingon redesign went well beyond visuals. They've always been crazy Space Vikings at heart, that really did not come across in Discovery. The entire vibe is off. It feels less like a reimagining of a classic thing and more just something totally new and different. But the og Klingon style is already back in SNW. Is it exactly the same as TNG Klingons? I have no fucking clue, probably not. But the vibe is much better.
I gotta go do some stuff, but I never really pegged Burnham as *overly* emotional. To the extent that she is, I do wonder how much of that is actually a reaction to her, as you say, being raised by Vulcans. Look at Spock, another super emotionally healthy member of that family...
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I did like the sarcophagus ship the Klingons had in Discovery though.
It still held a very Klingon design but felt kind of old and just weird.
The tools of criticism are objective
Criticism is an explanation of how well a thing works based on its own internal logic, it’s own context, and how well it achieves its narrative goals through the implementation of the various forms of artistic expressions vis a vis acting/writing/cinematography/ music/editing.
Preferences are based on individual subjective desires that are unique and usually unknowable by the artists creating the work.
An easy analogy:
If your sports team loses, a valid criticism would be how you think the coach made a mistake by benching a star player. There’s context and internal consistency to this criticism, and a gap in normal logic in not playing this player.
If, however, you also complained that the team should have played in their throwback jerseys and the coach should have switched their star player to a new position they’ve never played in, well, those aren’t criticisms. Those are preferences.
All Klingons are Beautiful
The designs are fine, but that one is the best of the bunch out of the box because it has a lot less Blue. I'm all for that Goa'uld style "ancient ruins as Starships" Sci-Fi, but bright blue windows was a bad choice. The Sech is particulary bad on that regard.
Me? I saw SNW last week and I thought it was cool.
“How well it achieves its narrative goals,” as presumed by the viewer. The work itself can provide enough material for an educated guess as to those goals, but the critical relationship is between the viewer and the work, not the viewer and the creative.
When a critic decides what a narrative’s goals are, they are projecting. Which is fine! And their conclusion can even speak to a wide audience, since many humans have a lot of common experience that inform their viewing of media in the same way, meaning lots of people will arrive at the same conclusions! But that’s not the same thing as objectivity.
Thank you for reminding me why I tend to stay out of this thread
🖖
For me, Burnham's emotional see saw seemed mostly from bad directing and writing (like that sketch in whitest kids you know with the open mouths bit), but it was definitely there and kind of a problem. Burnham was a grizzled cop in an action movie who shirks convention and "by the book" limitations. Taking things into their own hands to get shit done and catch the bad guy. But then the show is like, well here she is teary eyed with an apology. And it's like no. She's not sorry, she hasn't learned a lesson, and she's going to do it again.
Actually, what I was going for is “No criticism is invalid.” This started because you were trying to invalidate…
Christ, never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up.
Whining about uniforms is the most important possible criticism in Trek, because Space Barbie is endgame. Space Barbie is life.
In seriousness, I mostly agree with the caveat that production design can take someone out of the experience or make them less likely to engage in the first place. As an example, I’m convinced the 2017 Power Rangers movie would’ve been better received if (among other changes) it’s production design hadn’t been such a radical departure from the original.
The parts of Discovery where I was thinking “I really hate that collar” were usually the parts where the story just didn’t do it for me.
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That film showed that for a warrior race their border security is laughable. One of the Federation's most powerful starships was able to easily penetrate deep into Klingon space. Good scene though!
Like the Phaser Beam is an iconic weapon practically unique to Star Trek. Firing a single volley gives weight to battle. Getting hit by a phaser hurts in the TOS/TNG era, Fast ships where also small ships and while they could dodge beams, they where dunzo if they got hit. In fact one of the characteristics of the Defiant as a Hero ship was that it was a small ship that could take a punch. It stood out as a result. Meanwhile the Enterprise firing a single beam or launching a spread of torpedos was a signal that the time for talk was close to over.
It works because you got so many ways to tell the story of two ships fighting. You can damage the ship without asking "why aren't the heroes dead already". When its pew pew, it always devolves into dogfighting and the Ships lack the visual flair for it most of the time.
I mean compare the Enterprise drifting into the borg cube at the End of S3 Picard vs The Enterprise flying throught an asteroid in SNW(Among the Lotus Eaters). Both of them are equally CGI, probably from the same VFX house and they where both equally ridiculous in their own way. However, one of them looks like a weightless CGI(Pic) fest and the other(SNW) looks like it was something that the Enterprise could actually do. Purely because the SNW stuck to the visual language of Star Trek.
IMO the SNW example will age much better.
Given how much the Star Trek that followed it tries to worship at the altar of The Wrath of Khan, it does feel like the “submarine” and/or “Age of Sail” approach to combat that helped make The Wrath of Khan such a strong film wasn’t one of the takeaways for some of the current creative teams. Which is a damn shame.
I think one of the reasons Ricardo Montalbán is so good in that movie is because the pace of the combat gives him the space to be. Making combat more frenetic… well, if it doesn’t actively take away from character, it gives it fewer opportunities to flourish.
so I want to see the characters do and say lots of stuff during combat, a ship passing by and giving us 30 seconds while they "Swing around" gives us good scenes with the characters
Criticizing a team's new jersey's look at their reveal would certainly be valid though and later on if they're not doing well and still not even in the good jerseys why bother watching?
Plus I would imagine most people are not interested in being Critics and approaching everything from that perspective, they just want to watch a show that they like. People making the shows can certainly make whatever changes they want, it's not like we can stop them, but people are entitled to just straight up not like those changes and that's fine. Making changes just for the sake of making changes is not by itself a good thing, making changes to established looks is worse, and let's be honest here there were a grand total of 7 TOS-era Klingon appearances and only a few of those are memorable, like changing the Gorn in modern shows at the time it hardly mattered they were updated. If the show itself is good enough then that will be generally enough to drag people along, but people have plenty of issues with the content of Discovery too
You can't logic someone into liking something, we're not vulcans
...curious
And I might even be able to forgive that if there was any connection between the rapid cuts between the battle and the bridges. For example, during the battle against Control during the opening moments, Saru orders evasive maneuvers, Pike orders a direction change, and the bad guy leader ordered attack maneuvers by all his ships. Cut to an exterior shot and all of the ship's are utterly stationary while their auxiliary craft are tanking shots between the opposing capital ships.