STD 2×14: Trump Trek

2019/04/19 in science fiction, screenshots, serialized, spoiler
Tags: Ash Tyler, Burnham, Discovery, L'Rell, Leland, Pike, R2-D2, Red Angel, Sarek, Spock, Wormhole

It really was… Good grief. It’s like Trump is a writer on this show (I have the best and biggest time travel, I’m a very stable writer…). Every time he is caught in a lie, he’ll just double down and keep repeating the lie, despite being completely aware that everyone already knows it’s a lie… They said last episode they can’t contact Starfleet for backup and they repeat it this episode. Although it already was so painfully obvious last week, that they could have jumped to Starfleet directly with their spore drive at any time. No comms needed… They even use the spore drive last episode, just not to get help… The fuck? And let’s not go into it again, how Sarek could contact them, no problem. He has Starfleet on something like Skype or Discord for sure.

They really rub it in too (typical Trump move). In the last episode they sent messages to their friends and relatives, in case they won’t make it. This week we learn these messages were received. So how can they radio everybody, except for Starfleet? This is so extremely idiotic. Although this makes no sense in the first place, they could have asked their relatives to tell Starfleet all about their situation, since they forgot Starfleet’s number and Starfleet seemingly isn’t on Twitter.

But if someone thought they couldn’t go dumber than this, they sure showed us. Ash Tyler leaves the ship supposedly in a shuttle, which obviously has no spore drive and yet it’s no problem for him either, to reach the Klingon homeworld Kronos and get back to Discovery just in time. He too obviously could have contacted Starfleet and just chose not to for no reason whatsoever.
This however, isn’t even the worst part. We learned before, that L’Rell’s power as chancellor is completely based on the lie, that she killed Ash Tyler. But by Ash Tyler showing up alive and well now, this entire ruse has been exposed. L’Rell would loose all her power and the entire Klingon empire would go nuts. Overall STD has been very prolific in ignoring and/or retconning Star Trek, but STD can’t even manage to uphold its own lore/story.

Automatic robot repair drones (which drive around on the hull like R2-D2 in Star Wars)? Is anyone still counting how many retcons this makes in total?

During the fight we learn that Enterprise and Discovery somehow hold 500 shuttles each. :D I don’t even…

I love it, when Saru is just as WTF at his sister (the primitive village priest), being a fighter pilot all of a sudden, as the audience is. :D Once again, everyone is available on comms except Starfleet. No matter how remote they are.

How did the Kelpiens get the advanced fighters from the Ba’ul btw? Have they murdered all of them since we last saw them and took all their stuff? :D

The torpedo that gets stuck in the hull looks nothing like any other torpedo, why? They couldn’t figure out what that would look like, right? All other torpedos are these glowing red thingies. Not grey rectangular objects.

Then the Admiral dies for nothing, because she has to pull a lever… No one thinks of using a rope to pull the lever from the other side. FIXED. Or they could have beamed her out, since they have a TRANSPORTER ROOM. There is also this embarrassing moment, when Number One says goodbye and the Admiral says nothing back, because Number One doesn’t have a name… THE PAIN. :D

During the confrontation between the emperor and the AI, the emperor gets the AI, a being that doesn’t feel pain, to scream on command… I don’t have words.

The best part of the episode is, when Burnham’s usage of the red angel suit looks like a scene straight out of Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979. :D Come to think of it, so does Discovery’s flight through the wormhole. Which probably means this is no coincidence. It’s too bad that ripping off other stuff doesn’t automatically mean your stuff will be at least as good. :P

I’ve always said they were going to do something really stupid to explain the spore drive out of existence (because it never existed) and they did… It was every bit as dumb as I expected. During the debrief at Starfleet, it is declared that everyone in the know is forbidden from speaking about the existence of the spore drive (!) because of time travel. The spore drive however, has nothing to do with all the time travel. All of that was the red angel/Iron Man suit. So why should they keep a thing secret, that had nothing to do with the time travel? Once more this show wants everyone to be a complete idiot, who won’t be able to notice anything.

There is no way in hell, Starfleet would develop such a technology and then never use it again. During the Star Trek movies, it’s been made clear, that Starfleet is trying to develop the so-called transwarp drive. Remember the USS Excelsior? So Starfleet is clearly trying to improve their drive systems. But why put so much effort into developing a worse drive system, than the one Discovery already has? Starfleet could have needed the spore drive countless times and never would have abandoned it. Other species could have developed it, leaving Starfleet at a fatal disadvantage.

Even if they are in the future now (where they should have been in the first place with this show), it’s still a poisoned well, since it won’t wash them clean of their shitty origin. It’ll just make it harder to overlook, that they were shitting on Star Trek all this time for nothing. They even personified this with Spock. He did nothing the entire season and was entirely superfluous as a character. His sole reason for being there, was so they could name drop him in ads. Pathetic.

During the ending credits, they play the Discovery music AND a remix of the Star Trek theme simultaneously, which sounds as shitty as you would imagine. I guess it’s just consistent with the rest of the episode, in that it is designed to piss people off. :D

Other than season 1, the season 2 end gives no clue as to what 3 will be about, which probably means they have no fucking clue themselves and want to keep all options as wide open as possible.

Only one piece of information, which is not in the show directly, hints that Discovery won’t stay in the future, since the emperor was confirmed to get her own Section 31 show and she was still on Discovery when they departed. So they would have to get back just for that reason. Unless the emperor starts running Section 31 in the far future. Nothing is too far-fetched for this show, so…

PS: Why did Discovery have to go into the future at the end at all? The only reason to do it, was because of Control and the AI was killed, thus removing the entire reason for this operation. *sigh*

PPS: I’ve seen Orville 2×13 by now and it was great. :P It was about time travel (what isn’t these days…) and it was way more engaging than…