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'Star Trek: Discovery' Gets September Premiere Date On CBS & CBS All Access, Season 1 Split In Two (deadline.com)
Nellie Andreeva, writing for Deadline: Star Trek: Discovery will debut Sunday, September 24, with a special broadcast premiere on the CBS TV network airing 8:30-9:30 PM. The first as well as the second episode of the sci-fi series will be available on-demand on CBS All Access immediately following the broadcast premiere, with subsequent new episodes released on All Access each Sunday. Originally slated for a January 2017 premiere, Star Trek: Discovery's debut was first pushed to May and then to fall 2017. At CBS' upfront presentation, the company announced that Star Trek: Discovery's first-season order had been increased from 13 to 15 episodes. The expanded season now will be split into two. The first eight episodes will run Sundays from September 24 through November 5. The season then will resume with the second chapter in January 2018. The break also will allow the show more time for postproduction on latter episodes.
Now the new stuff coming out has been great! Arrival, Interstellar, Passenger, I'm forgetting a couple of others were written by real science fiction writers - Rodenberry wasn't.
You can't see it, but I'm shaking my head left and right.
Arrival was fucking stupid. We start with aliens and some interesting premise about communicating with them, but we end up with political bullshit that gets solved with time travel, telepathy, and essentially magic. The whole premise is shot when that shit happens because: Why couldn't the aliens use their time travel telepathy bullshit to help themselves? Why couldn't the aliens see / prevent the bomb? Or even more to the point, why couldn't the aliens see learning our language and then just communicate with us in out language? The whole fucking time they're sitting behind their glass barrier and watching Pam from The Office (I know it's not her) pantomime shit. The only thing missing was a Speak and Say toy. The aliens didn't do a damned thing to communicate with us, despite it being revealed that they'll need our help one day.
Interstellar? Are you fucking kidding me? It devolves into time travel and spiritual/magical wankery so fucking quickly. And the first half is more about the fucking dust bowl than it is about sci-fi. As with any time travel movie, there are plot holes out the ass. But it doesn't fucking matter, I guess, because the movie is focused on a couple of people and how they are sad and dumb. The final scenes are like they watched 2001's LSD trip and decided to try and make something that makes even less sense.
Passengers? Well that started out with some potential, at least. But it ended up being a romance/drama movie more than a sci-fi movie. I get that the dude struggled with the idea of opening someone's capsule up and all that. But once the decision was made to open one up, why did he have to choose a useless lady? I don't even remember her credentials. Oh wait - I do. She had none. She was writing a book. Maybe next time when you're browsing through all the records you'll pick a mechanic, a machinist, a tech, a security officer, or anyone who can help you fix shit. He had three problems.
1) Why did I wake up early / what's wrong with the ship?
2) How can I go back to sleep in a pod so I don't die alone?
3) How can I get through the security door?
He chose to solve problem 4 - I'm sad and lonely and haven't gotten laid in a long time.
I'm not saying problem 4 wasn't a problem that needed solving. But he could've also solved problems 1, 2, and 3 had he picked the right person (or people) to wake up. There's a lot of the hemming and hawing about not wanting to wake even a single person up because it would doom them to die on the ship and (nearly) alone. But you've got trouble in River City, son. Trouble with with a capital T. Every fucking day he spent enjoying the bar from The Shining and not working on the problem was irresponsible and, more importantly, stupid.
He had access to everyone's records. He could have found a few people with skills / clearance to help him repair/reset the pods, fix the ship, or get past the security door to wake up people with more clearance / skills to repair/reset the pods and fix the ship.
But no, he waits months (or years) to just choose Katniss Everdeen, who provides no help on the whole "shit's on fire, yo" front. And when they do get a 3rd person, the whole thing about "Oh no, they woke up and now they're doomed to die here." is still focused on Katniss instead of the new dude who is actively dying a painful, drawn out death.
I can look past the generic reactor core shit, and the ship is broke but it don't know it's broke setup. But the movie as a whole had so very little to do with sci-fi and much too much to do with romance.
As for ol' Gene Rberry, I agree. He wasn't really a sci-fi writer.