First Star Trek: Discovery trailer

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Ok, I generally like what they have going here (although not so thrilled about the Klingons, think they should have stuck with TNG design), so this is going sound incredibly pedantic, but… chevrons on uniforms for a ship that is NOT the Enterprise?

In the prime universe the inverted chevron was the symbol of the Enterprise only, it wasn’t adopted as the general Starfleet insignia until sometime after TOS ended (but before TMP).

Look at TOS - every ship has their own uniform insignia, but only the Enterprise crew wears chevrons.

Even fan shows like Starship Farragut managed to get this right, how can an official CBS/Paramount production have such a huge miss?!

Pretty big continuity error if they are trying to stay “faithful” to TOS history.

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@Konservenknilch - I’m with you. The 1701 refit/1701-A design is absolutely, positively my favorite of all the starship designs. I always thought, more than any other design of any other starship, that it really fit with what I think a faster-than-light, military- and exploration-use starship should look like.

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…Kind of like when the Mongols ruled China…

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For me it’s a tie between the 1701-A and the 1701-D. The 1701-A’s interior wins hands down though. The interior of the TNG ship looked terrible.

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Between Enterprise and the Abrams movies, I agree.
Star Trek is dead.

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People who don’t have easy access to the legit channels to watch this, so they keep you in the dark lest you go out and pirate it. Maybe?

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Hmm… I just learned that apparently there is not good translation for the phrase “der Gedanke drängt sich auf”. Yes, while this idea is kind of obvious, I never felt the need to reconcile these two episodes. I liked the idea of the Milky Way having been seeded with a self-directing humanoid design AND having an incredibly rich history of humanoid societies coming and going. Like the T’Kon and Iconians, which had a huge empires hundreds of thousand years ago, flourished and went away, either dying out or ascending beyond the power of the Borg. Migrations of Races like Vulcans developing space flight and creating offspring races like Romulans, then falling back and getting up again. Plus Preservers and Tholians and Gorn - aliens from totally independent lines of evolution with agenda and histories of their own.

Kind of like Perry Rhodan, where after 3.000 issues one has an incredible rich history, where Terrans and their cousins count their histories in 10.000s of years, quite a few alien species likewise and all in front of a larger history spanning millions of years and beings beyond human comprehension. Like the Q, but those came late.

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I don’t see how they could know that I don’t have access to the Space Channel or CraveTV, the two legitimate ways to watch it where I am.

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The Borg we’re fun a few times. They got old real quick IMHO. They’re beyond incompetent and there is no way they’d take over a quarter of the galaxy when anyone with half a plan defeats them. Q is among the dumbest antagonists in Trek history.

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I agree, both Borg and Q are incredibly hard to write. I consider both forces of nature.

My idea for the Borg is that they migrate through the galaxy. Unable to innovate or even reproduce themselves, they are some kind of army ants, sweeping quadrants of space, moving on. afterwards. They ignore primitive worlds (like our Earth), but clash with TOS/TNG-tech civilizations, knocking those back for centuries or millennia. More powerful civilizations ignore the Borg or sweep them aside, but aren’t really interested in wiping them out, galaxy wide, which would be hard to do. But they were very badly handled in TNG, giving them basically human motivations by introducing Queens and powering them up again and again.

Q likewise. It’s an all-powerful being. I wouldn’t even consider it an antagonist, as a Q could literally wipe out humanity by snapping a finger. As amusing as John de Lancie was, a Q is nothing you can make an antagonist from. The main interest it can provide is a setting then protagonist can grapple with himself. All these “Q learns something from humans”-stories are pointless and make about as much sense as humans leaning something beyond simply biology from a bacterium.

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Yet even army ants are much more adaptable and robust than the Borg. Unless they overwhelm quickly and decisively, the Borg are basically screwed. And they seem to have zero network security. It’s just hard for me to swallow them surviving. I look at them as a failed opportunity. Could have been amazing if they actually had been a group mind like army ants, but instead the writers turned them into the anti-Janeway.

True, he’s literally a dues ex mechina, the personification of lazy writing. I enjoy Star Trek a lot, but I’m a harsh critic.

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The Fashion it So blog feels the same as me: http://sttngfashion.tumblr.com/post/160802340223/star-trek-discovery-trailer

Also, yeah, I was assuming that’s some kind of piping. Better not be a zipper. Rodenberry was very anti-visible-fasteners. TOS men’s shirts have a hidden zipper that runs along the top of the shoulder, around the front of the arm, and down the side seam. As someone who sews, that is an elaborate way to conceal a zipper.

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Netflix has its own version of the trailer that we can watch. Unfortunately, it’s different from the CBS trailer - there is at least one scene missing.

Shénzhōu (神舟), literally “divine ship”, as in the name the Chinese have been giving to their manned spaceship.

That’s a part I’m excited about. This is basically the first “important” Star Trek ship that is not named straight out of US tradition.

Star Trek is always lauded for being progressive about representing minorities, but that is strictly limited to American minorities.
I once wrote down a list of 53 Star Trek main characters from all Star Trek series: 21 aliens, 27 humans from English-speaking cultures (most of them Americans) and 5 people from non-English speaking cultures.
And that includes people like “John Luke” Picard, the alleged Frenchman who can’t pronounce his own name.

So, Shénzhōu, definitely a step in the right direction. I wonder if they’ve got anyone on the cast who can pronounce it, though - Mandarin is hard in that respect.

To this day, I don’t understand that. It’s among my least favorite, and I feel special hatred towards it because it started the tradition of making star trek films about a fight against some insane supervillain (#2, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13) whose main motive is revenge (#2, #9, #10, #11, #13). At least I don’t remember a fist fight with the villain (#9, #10, #11, #12, #13).
That’s never been what the series were about, except maybe a few of the worst episodes. I’m kind of afraid that they’ll have a pseudo-Klingon supervillain for the new series. But I’m carefully optimistic.

I don’t really get what the obsession with prequels is. I mean, prequels are a fun concept if what you care about is the continuity. You can do really fun things with that.
But most of the audience doesn’t care that much about consistency and continuity, so we keep getting prequels that just don’t fit and just make no sense. So what’s the point then?

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Note that I don’t disagree with you here at all. I was writing about the Borg as an idea. Their implementation sucked after the 3rd Borg episode at latest.

Even back during TNG’s first run I argued that they missed a great chance by sticking to their loosely-connected-episodes format, where all later developments are basically ad hoc improvisations. Not that it wasn’t easy to miss that chance: At that time that was the format for nearly all serial works, which at best had some personal development and reoccurring motifs. Remington Steele’s romance and father issues on the one hand, but the Hearts of Heart to Heart basically being fixed characters. Even soap operas like Dalles and Dynasty - I’m open to correction here - seemed to be basically plot driven (so one could see how something would work out later) but kept the characters mostly static. In my view, the turning year was 1993, wenn Gargoyles and Babylon 5 came out and began long running stories which span multiple episodes, even a whole season, where characters changes, switches alliances and foreshadowed events came to a culmination. They did try to craft this on later seasons of DS9, but didn’t apply this model to Voyager, at least not the first couple of seasons I watched.

Here I disagree. A deux ex machine is something that happens at the very last moment without any prior motivation. Q’s a bad storytelling device, though, overused in most cases, catastrophically bad when the episode is about Q learning something or making him accessible.

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The only Q episode I like is Tapestry, and he’s barely in it.

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Not mine. It liked it a lot when it came out, mostly because it was action and tighter than the snooze-fest that was TMP. (Nothing against the idea of TMP, but it was basically a hour long episode blown up to movie length, with additional minute upon minutes upon minutes of “Look how pretty our new Enterprise model and space effects are.”)

My favorite by far is Star Trek 4. I tent not to dwell on 3, 5, 6. Was mildly okay with 7 due to nostalgia, 8 and later are a blur, didn’t even see all of them. I’d rather actually either reread John Ford or Diane Duane novels or rewatch the JJ Abrams Trek movies. Haben’t seen 3 there, though,

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I think it’s not even a Q episode. It could have been any other alien or even no alien at all, like Picard having a stroke and the whole episode being the result of his brain recreating his identity wile Beverly Crusher is busy repairing his burst vessel and administering Memorex from BabbleCorp, a new drug that enables neurons to repair themselves and their nets.

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I thought necrophilia was a primarily post-modern predilection.

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I’m not surprised to be underwhelmed by the trailer, but trailers can be pretty deceiving. I hope that they have just cut together what they think looks like the most exciting parts and the actual meat of the show will be more substantive than this appears to be.

The sets, makeup and vfx look top-notch… Christ, too much back-lighting and flares though. I hope that the time and resources invested in the visuals is carried over into the writing. I’d rather they just have locked-off cameras if it meant that the money saved was to be put into creative storytelling… This is the curse of top-shelf properties and why medium budget SF is often superior… with cheaper productions the studios are less inclined to appeal to a broad audience or try to compete with film.

As a TNG fan, its painful to see the property transmuted into many other genres, over-emphasizing action and troubled characters. The series needs a singular creative vision to re-energize it… Not sure the committee can make it happen.

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“Qpid” was worthwhile for this line alone.

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