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Star Trek: Discovery Is Returning For a Second Season (engadget.com)
Engaget reports that CBS' Star Trek: Discovery series is being renewed for a second season. The show has reportedly been enough of a success to justify a second season of episodes. From the report: The move comes as a vote of confidence for both the show and its platform, since it has recently aired the sixth of its fifteen-episode first season. Now, a second run of Discovery will air, presumably at some point toward the back-half of 2018. Discovery has certainly benefited from plenty of hype, since it's the first Trek show to air as a TV show since 2005. The pull of the Star Trek name was always going to be a draw, but it wasn't clear how much of a draw given the saga's lackluster popularity at the box office. CBS refused to offer numbers, but did boast that Discovery's debut lead to the highest number of sign-ups in the history of its All Access service.
I don't give a shit I'm not signing up for their stupid pointless streaming service just to watch one show. 0% chance the show will remain exclusive forever. I can wait.
As overrated as it is overexposed and oversaturated.
I can't imagine many of those subscriptions will be around for season 2.
The show itself kinda sucks. A lot of the technology bullshit is so far out there it's not even something you can remotely imagine as being real. There was a certain charm to the older series because you'd see stuff on the show and think "well, OK, maybe we'll see that in 50-100 years if we're lucky". Discovery is packed full of so much random crap you kinda look at it and go "uhhhh no, not gonna happen". It's like they decided to transition from futuristic-but-almost-plausible to outright space magic because that was easier to write.
Everything else feels like a bog standard Hollywood action movie with tons of CG. It's almost well done enough that it's generally watchable, but again, it isn't Star Trek. I don't find myself thinking about the implications of what's going in the show, in fact, I don't find myself thinking very much at all when I'm watching it. It's just kinda senseless action with the Star Trek name bolted on because OMG recognizable franchise.
I'm pretty sure it's going to get really old really fast (I'm already starting to get bored with it). Once they run out of inertia from the hype and name alone, the show is doomed.
CBS refused to offer numbers, but did boast that Discovery's debut lead to the highest number of sign-ups in the history of its All Access service.
Said CBS spokesman Donald Trump.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
”CBS refused to offer numbers, but did boast that Discovery's debut lead to the highest number of sign-ups in the history of its All Access service.”
So that means at least 10 people signed up because of Discovery, I’m guessing?
#DeleteChrome
I downloaded the first 2 episodes, watched half of the first one, then deleted them both. I want some compensation for my wasted time and mental suffering.
They should fire the writers of Discovery and hire the Orville team instead. Marry the solid writing of a real Star Trek show (The Orville) with the high production values of the knock-off (Discovery).
The Orville is a true to form Star Trek show disguised as generic sci-fi.
Discovery is generic sci-fi disguised as Star Trek.
I'm seeing some negativity here, but I very much enjoy this season. It's Star Trek, but for once its crew is not infallible and almost-perfect. Nope, these people are damaged goods. Captain Lorca has been trapped, tortured, had to abandon his crew, etc. So he is VERY focused, to the point where you not only think "wow, this is a tough S.O.B." and then continues into the territory of eye-for-an-eye.
I don't much like their Spore Drive, but the dark and serious atmosphere makes it worth it, IMHO.
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I didn't really like the new show. Not sure why
Here's my reasons - see if any strike a chord.
First of all, none of the characters are likeable. I wouldn't care if any or all of them got eaten by their monster-cum-computer.
Second, the show lacks the "lightness" and humanity of previous incarnations. (Although Voyager comes close, in terms of grinding tedium and unnecessary earnestness).
Finally, the Klingons. Really? The show simply doesn't need all that pseudo-religious claptrap. In TOS and others, they were a bit-part, just another baddie. I have no desire to bond with them and don't need any of their back story, culture or infighting. Just shoot the suckers!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Uh... 7.3 on iMDB for a TV show, that's not good. No need to wait.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Given that the show is supposedly set about a decade before TOS, and that nobody in the whole Star Trek universe heard of Spore Drive until Discovery, should mean that Spore Drive technology will fail so spectacularly that nobody ever mentions it again and they just settle for "slow" Warp Drive for the rest of the future. Even the Borg have only Trans-Warp conduits to help them move faster.
If they still have Spore Drive in season 2 they're mad - otherwise they'll have to declare it an "alternate universe" story, and then watch how everybody suddenly understands why the Klingons look like a totally different species.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
The problem with deflector dishes is that the ship is travelling at (say, warp 2, which is four times the speed of light) and the deflector dish puts out a beam which travels faster than that forward of the ship to sweep away all that pesky interstellar dust.
Two things :
- Alcubierre drives, the theoretical physics concept around which the fictional warp drives are based do not actually move the ship.
At all. The ship stays completely immobile in its own frame of reference. (There wouldn't be a way to move it past speed of light anyway).
What you move it the frame of reference it self. You bend the space time it self. You contract it in front of the ship, and expand it behind.
And unlike speed of things which is limited (at C, the speed of light), space-time bending isn't limited
(How the hell to you think our real-world astronomers can observe the distant past by looking at far away points in the space ? if our solar system was just a moving object, it would obligatory move slower than speed of light, and the light emitted in the distant past would have "over-taken" us and would not be observable anymore. The trick is that the space time of our actual universe did expand it self. More space was "created" between the objects, so that now they are further apart, and we can still catch "glimpse" of the beginning of the universe - some of these past images haven't reach us yet, because these image suddenly have way more space to travel to reach us because of that space-time expansion)
The only difference is that Alcubiere drive is a completely theoretical concept. It might not even be doable in the real world : it might happen that distorting the space time this way could require more energy than contain in the universe that you're trying to distort (it took a whole bigbang to expand our universe).
Whereas in Star Trek they just use dilithium crystals or some other fictional stuff in their warp core and can warp around freely.
- Speed of light. :
You're reasoning "the deflector dish puts out a beam which travels faster than that forward of the ship" is based on old classical physics (the speed of some launched from a moving something is the sum of both speeds : a photon launched from a ship travelling near the light speed would it self be launched at nearly twice the lights speed). Classical physics at that speed don't work and give wrong results (there's no such thing as an object moving at twice the light speed).
You're entering the realm of relativist physics
No matter what, the light speed (in vacuum) is constant and the same same every where in all referential. When an object is moving, from the point of view of the object the radiation it's shining forward will travel at exactly 1 C. From your point of view as an observer, the radiation of the deflector will travel at exactly 1 C *too*.
The thing that will change is the time and space. The scales will seems squished and time will seem running slow, so at the end, both the ship and observer will see the same distance/time = speed of light for the radion. The speed of light doesn't change, is the distance and time which end up being different.
There's a bunch of math to compute all this, but then ... (appropriate citation, in Bone's voice) I'm a doctor, Jim ! Not an astrophysicist)
---
(Also not mentioned in your post, but also relevant to the discussion of Star Trek technology : artificial gravity and inertial dampeners.
General relativity.
Which basically states that gravity actually works by playing around with space time too. Except this time, it isn't by expanding or contracting space, but by curving it. Objects aren't actually "attracted" to each other. They simply travel on straight lines (imagine a point travelling on grid on a sheet of paper), but the "straight lines" them selves are curved by the presence of mass (if you draw a sun in the middle of your sheet of paper, the grid suddenly isn't squares anymore but spirals that head towa
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm enjoying it. They're making a lot of references to the EU of Trek; the old Pocket Books novel series that really fleshed out most of it (such as, for example, the Klingons wanting to be declared 'Unforgettable') and what not. ST:TAS introduced basic holodecks to the original Enterprise, so whatever.
Which leads to the second point; *real life* has already outstripped TOS in so many ways, it would be impossible to make a 'prequel' that looked like 'earlier technology' than TOS without it looking really fucking stupid. Besides, I remember when ST:TMP came out, people asked 'why do Klingons look different?' Roddenberry said 'That's what they've always looked like, we just didn't have the capability back in the 60s.'
Third, I thought they did a great job of coming up with, dare I say, the first 'logical' explanation of why Sarek would hook up with a human woman, and why he was able to get away with it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Holodeck Pre-TOS: It was supposed to be new in the Era of TNG.
Holographic Displays everywhere: Was there *EVER* any in Trek?
Transporters like they're safe!: McCoy was still concerned about transporters in TOS, and the tech was still known for mishaps in the TOS era. Yet they use them in EVERY POSSIBLE SITUATION they could be dangerous. I mean beaming them off a small fast moving fightcraft being fired on by the Klingons? That sure seems like the sort of situation a 'new' technology would have mishaps with.
The biggest issues so far were believing Michael had ever passed for Vulcan, that the commander woman who was sleeping with the Captain and died on Discovery was that stupid, and that Tilly/the Admiral were that touchy feely emotional as a recruit on a Black Ops ship, and an Admiral in the Federation. The Admiral sleeping with the Captain just felt like something out of The Orville, which makes wonder if the fraternizing in that show was a jab at ST:D (even more apt giving all the sleeping around.)
Here is hoping at 2 seasons, it will also be notable for being the shortest Trek series ever and not get a third...
Having said that, the Captain, the gay scientist, the doctor, and a few other characters have all been top notch, if not what you'd expect of Trek figures. Honestly if they had spun it as an original show and omitted the Trek aspects I might like it, but too much of it feels JJ Abrams inspired, rather than post-Enterprise or strictly pre-TOS. Personally I think it would have been a lot better if they had done it in retro motif with TOS style sets and uniforms and kept the budgets small. Oh and make an intro that seemed like a Trek instead of an evolution of the crappy intro in Enterprise. Trek is about *SPACE*, show a starscape, show a ship. Don't show a crappy montage on a sepia colored screen.
I signed up. I watched the premiere. It was terrible. That was the end of my signup.
I don't know WTF is wrong with having a damned science advisor on the production team, and listening to them. But apparently there is something wrong with it. Because they either didn't have one, or they didn't listen to them, either of which is deadly for producing something that purports to be SF.
I'll grant you that trek has always been some kind of broken, science-wise, but this version, the premiere anyway, was near maximum suck.
And then there were the long angsty conversations in the captain's ready room when there was a bloody emergency going on.
What a load of CGI-shiny poop.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Holodeck Pre-TOS: It was supposed to be new in the Era of TNG.
Yeah, that puzzled me as well. On the other hand, it was shown in use by friendly aliens in ST:Enterprise, and it has IIRC only been used once (for tactical training). I also suspect that the main reason that it was not in TOS was that the special effects technology of the time did not make it feasible for them. What irked me more about that was their kill count. If klingons are so bad fighters, it is surprising that the Klingon empire haven't been overwhelmed by fiercer fighters ... like maybe the vulcans?
Transporters like they're safe! [snip] I mean beaming them off a small fast moving fightcraft being fired on by the Klingons?
Dangerous? Yes. More dangerous than trying to get the fighter to board? Maybe not.
The Admiral sleeping with the Captain just felt like something out of The Orville
Assuming that the two was an item before they became senior officers and that the Federation is not as uptight about sex as modern American culture, it makes some sense that an admiral unsure of the sanity of an important and driven captain could take unorthodox measures to get him to let down his guard so that his actual mental state shone through. Rubbing in his nose, however, was rather stupid on her part.
Having said that, the Captain, the gay scientist, the doctor, and a few other characters have all been top notch, if not what you'd expect of Trek figures.
The captain is an interesting character. I just hope that they stop making him the superman-action star who can kill 1,000 klingons with his bare hands before breakfast while chewing bubble-gum and curing cancer.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Transporters like they're safe!: McCoy was still concerned about transporters in TOS, and the tech was still known for mishaps in the TOS era. Yet they use them in EVERY POSSIBLE SITUATION they could be dangerous.
Meanwhile, The Orville avoids them. There is some kind of transporter technology, but only in the hands of higher-tech-level aliens, without even explaining how they work (magic reassembly, wormholes, whatever).
And it's a good thing too, because transporters are a lazy-ass plot device, probably the weakest tech of Star Trek. Okay, so you can be disassembled inside the transporter station, but how does it cause you to be reassembled perfectly, hundreds of miles away?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Roddenberry had planned for the holodeck to be in TOS, but due to budget issues it was never used. It did appear in the animated series though.
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