Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

SPOILERS for those who haven't seen episode 5 yet.

The science in this season, and this episode, is seriously wonky.

Again, 5 light year wide black hole (including accretion disk which means its gravitational pull is the size of that accretion disk), disappears and reappears light years away (by the way, the Barzan wormhole did that because it was unstable, and it was a natural wormhole). This is what I meant by the entire galaxy being in danger. They were tracking it the whole time, and then it just up and jumped 1,000 light years away. They're treating it like it's more the size of a large asteroid or small planetoid rather than something that stretches from here to Betelgeuse.

That aside, the new guy creates a miniature version of the anomaly, despite just saying that the technology is far beyond what they are capable, and uses the simulation to build more data on how much power it requires to maintain its presence. The reveal? It's being powered by a hypergiant. I'm just going to come right out and say that the fusion power of even a hypergiant isn't going to be enough to power a 5 light year wide black hole. The largest hypergiant we currently know of, that is classed as a hypergiant, is UY-Scuti, which is 7 AU across.

To reiterate, the DMA is 316,205 AU across. That would be like a monster truck being powered by a watch battery. It just doesn't add up.

Now, the science aside, there were some good character moments. It was great to see Jett Reno again, and I'm glad Culber is confronting his survivors guilt. I could see a hundred miles away that the sacred flute music guy was definitely going to die, but overall it was pretty well done.

This one gets a 5 out of 10 from me. Not bad, but not great either, and no Tilly.

Good lord this show is a turd sandwich. I didn't give a rats ass about the prisoners. You wanna stay here and die? See ya. The forced emotion on this show is so tiresome. Every week someone is losing it, it's getting old. The douche bag scientist sucked, but it was the only thing interesting to cling on to. So the Q haven't been heard from in 600 years, I wonder if there's more to the story or was it just a name drop. They keep mentioning that someone made the anomoly and keep making a big deal out of and automatically assume it was for nefarious purposes. Who fucking cares? All you need to do is figure out how to either stop it or avoid it. Is Detmer even in this show anymore? The cast basically consists of Stamets, Culber, Booker, Turnham and Saru with the rest of them getting like five seconds of screen time.

I don't know what this means and I don't care. Just be aware it's probably not as clever as you think it is.

Well... yeah.

You know who the main cast actually consists of, right? The folks listed in the opening credits? Those people are the stars, their characters are the focus of the series. That's how it's always been with every Trek series, you have the stars and your recurring actors. Did you complain when Voyager didn't Samantha Wildman and Joe Carey enough screentime?





*The TOS cast is bad for complaining about this. I love the TOS cast, but Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley were the stars and everyone else was lucky to be there every week. It wasn't supposed to be an ensemble.

It's a typo.

Yeah, we were spoiled by TNG, DS9 and VOY, which made sure to feature huge portions of the cast at all times in some way, whether through the A or B plot.

Poor Harry Kim.

Around the time that TNG was launched, I can remember reading an interview with someone who was involved as either writer or producer and they said, "You know how Trek had the Big Three with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy? Well, we're going to have the Big Eight!" I can also remember reading an interview with someone talking about what made TOS such a standout show. They pointed out that Spock and McCoy represented the Superego and the Id, with Kirk as the Ego, trying to sort things out as the other two battled about him. This is pretty clearly hinted at in TWoK with this exchange:
Spock: Really, Dr. McCoy. You must learn to govern your passions; they will be your undoing. Logic suggests...

McCoy: Logic? My God, the man's talking about logic; we're talking about universal Armageddon! You green-blooded, inhuman...

Another fat Tilly joke....

The reason the anomaly disappeared for the amount of time it did, Tilly arrived at Starfleet Academy, feeling a bit nostalgic she visited the Starfleet Museum, in particular the Constitution Class Starship that is there, and reminiscing over the transporters of her time she used the transporter from the Constitution ship, she was held as a matter stream for that four point something seconds, the same amount of time the anomaly disappeared. Turns out the anomaly appeared at the same time Tilly gained a certain amount of mass as a spacial anomaly twin.

OK, I'm blowing past a page of posts without reading them because I haven't seen Episode 5 yet, but I had to post this ...

Was I the only person who didn't know that there is a real Paul Stamets, and he studies mushrooms, and the character was named after him?

With TNG, DS9, VOY and even ENT, you had seven or eight main cast members, generally the primary bridge/ops crew, chief engineer, and chief medical officer, credited in the opening titles. Discovery has multiple main cast members as well, but since the first three seasons didn't have a captain as the primary protagonist, the main cast members aren't the same people you'd see in a regular Trek series. That's fine with me, since we've seen the old formula played out a bunch of times already.

Yeah, but Detmer’s hot.

I have his book: Mycelium Running.
Dude's brilliant as fuck. I highly recommend reading it.

OK -- I definitely enjoyed that episode.

The "this alien culture has some prisoners and maybe there's more to the situation than meets the eye" plot device has been used on Trek a lot, and this was one of the more straightforward examples -- unlike, say, TNG's "The Hunted" there weren't many surprises, nor did the crew have to spend a lot of time unraveling what was going on. But it was only half of the episode's plot, so it had roughly the level of complexity that it needed, and the resolution was satisfying.

The introduction of the Jerkass Scientist provides an opportunity to poke and prod Stamets' character in interesting ways, and probably will continue to do so.

I like that they show Culber dealing with the repercussions of his death and resurrection, even though he died over two years ago (assuming that DIS follows the convention of each season representing a year of in-story time, which I'm not sure it does). Previous Treks had a tendency to fuck with the characters in major, life-altering ways and then just have it be completely forgotten by the next episode.

The Rhys exposition ("oh by the way, Captain, my town was destroyed by a hurricane when I was little, so that's why I want to lead this evacuation") was a little clumsy, but not as awkward as the random things they came up with for Owosekun (being from a colony of Luddites, being able to hold her breath for a very long time) that the writers didn't bother to introduce until 10 minutes before the plot demanded it.

The bit with the random piece of phlebotinim powering the force field was, in a way, a reminder of Burnham's upbringing. Knowing that the Whatsit is an excellent heat conductor? Perfectly normal piece of information for a former science officer to have. Knowing its precise K-value, whatever that is? That's somebody who spent her childhood being drilled by Vulcan computers and trying to prove herself to her Vulcan father.

Obviously there's more in store regarding Jerkass Scientist Guy. It'll be interesting to see what it is.

The whole premise of Star Trek involves them warping space with relatively little power compared to that natural phenomenon need to do so, and artificial gravity is seen as a trivial problem to the point that small shuttles with piddly fusion generators can create gravitational force inside themselves equivalent to that from a whole planets worth of mass.

The warping of space requires massive amounts of power, hence the M/AM reaction chamber. As for artificial gravity, it even functions with the power out, so there's more to it than that (aside from the obvious real reason, of course).

The takeway from this is that bigger is not always better, and they just keep throwing big at us, like a 5 ly wide anomaly:

No, seriously, TON 618, the largest black hole we know of, has a mass of 66 BILLION Suns, has a Schwarzchild radius of 1300 AU. A 5 light year wide anomaly is 325,200 AU.

This is TON 618:

Again, that's TON 618, and it's 1/250th the size of this anomaly. A galactic core would need to be used to power it, and a hypergiant star is doing the job? There's suspension of disbelief, and then there's just making shit up and expecting it to stick because it sounds big.

More to the point, hypergiants burn off their fuel faster just to sustain themselves, losing mass in the process, so they're also too unstable to use as a power source, but none of that plays into it beyond "bigger."

There's no method to it outside of "go bigger." The key is to make impossible science sound plausible, but this is just... no. I shudder to think what will threaten the entire universe next season, because clearly every season has to be about something threatening the entire galaxy/universe, etc.

What's most grievous is it didn't have to happen. They could have said a black hole the size of our solar system that moves at warp speed, but they didn't. They chose a 5 light year black hole, so large that it could encompass our Sun, all of Proxima Centauri, and be licking at the edges of Barnard's Star, without having moved. They depict it as something much MUCH smaller, too, and it's just, it's "the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs" but as a season arc.

I was hoping Discovery would take on more unique challenges, given the clean slate they wanted to use with jumping 900 years into the future, but it's all the same stuff, just 900 years into the future, and it doesn't even look 900 years into the future. Again, too big, too much, there's no connection for me there, which is a consistent issue I've had with the show this season.

I think the writers thought 5 light years sounded really big, without appreciating how INSANELY big a 5 light year anomaly is.

And I lol'ed when he said hypergiant. Aren't standard warp cores meant to have the equivalent energy output of a star (I could be making that up) ?

In any event, they said hypergiant for the same reason as they did 5 light year anomaly - it sounds impressive. Unfortunately it doesn't make a lick of sense.

Defenders will charge in and say all Trek tech is magic. Point is, Trek has always - or at least used to - attempt a level of versimilitude in regard to it's magic tech. That's part of the fun! Here, it's all too apparent that no one even tried (a hypergiant would probably keep the anomaly switched on for a few seconds before burning out). But, you know ... HYPERgiant!

All that said I'd except the wonky science stuff just fine if they managed to cobble together a decent story.

There is something annoyingly Star Wars-esque about writers feeling compelled to make threats AS! BIG! AS! POSSIBLE! even if it doesn't make any sense.

Original Star Wars: "This is a death star. It will blow up a planet."
Early 2000s Star Wars: <politics and shit, honestly>
Modern Star Wars: "This is a Starkiller. It will blow up an entire solar system."

Eh. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Feels like authentic Star Trek to me. Which doesn't mean perfection and nothing to complain about. But a lot of the criticism doesn't ring true to me.

I agree that constantly going BIGGER isn't engaging from a storytelling perspective, but trying to nitpick it from a science perspective doesn't stand up compared to all the other science already taken as a given in Trek.

Yeah, perspective and distance are forever fucked in Star Trek. It takes Voyager 70 years at high warp to get most of the way across the galaxy from the Delta Quadrant, but people aren't spending years crossing Federation space. The longest trip I remember hearing of is DS9 to Cestus 3 taking six weeks because it's on the other side of the Federation. DS9 to Earth was maybe a week? And Bashir considers that "the frontier?" But you look at a map of the Alpha and Beta quadrants and they don't give you the impression that the area of charted space is actually that tiny compared to Voyager's planned course home. Oh, and Kirk crossed the "galactic barrier" twice, once after starting out from Earth not that long ago. It's ridiculous.

I wonder to what extent the way Trek handles distance is a result of what other entertainment settings were common in each era.

The Federation in TOS feels very much like the way white Euro-Americans probably felt about the West in the early to mid-19th century. Sure, they'd been all the way to the Pacific, but there were still vast swaths of the continent whose geography and inhabitants were all but unknown to Washington. In TOS, a Federation outpost could be within Federation space and still be isolated enough that if something bad happened, it might not be known for a few years. Probably not a coincidence that TOS was developed toward the tail end of the heyday of the TV Western.

By the TNG era, the Old West myths had faded significantly in popularity, and Trek's conception of the Federation started to feel a lot more like the modern United States -- well-defined boundaries, everything within them is ours and we know where it is, every person within them is subject to our jurisdiction.

In reality, it seems like the density of stars in the galaxy is probably such that if you travel from Earth to Bajor, you might pass near several inhabited Federation worlds, but you might also pass near many systems that had never been charted except by long-range sensors, or that nobody had been to in years, especially if they were uninhabited.

(It also seems like "Federation space" would probably not be a blob of area with well-defined borders, but rather a collection of solar systems, each with their own protected sphere around them, and the Starfleet-protected shipping lanes between them. Presumably there are inhabited planets that lie between one Federation world and another, but that didn't decide to join the Federation. Or maybe that is how it works, since we mainly hear talk of borders and territory when there's a confrontation with species that seem like they probably are the type to claim control over everything within a well-defined region of space.)

Decent episode.

AFAIK it's the first appearance of the Akaali since S1 of ENT.

The Federation definitely has identifiable borders, given the existence of the Romulan neutral zone, the Klingon neutral zone, and the Federation/Cardassian border wars that O'Brien fought in. That's at least 3 edges to a map of Federation space. I've seen fan maps that depict Federation space as a blob surrounded by the Klingons and Romulans on the right and the Cardassians, Breen, Tzenkethi and Ferengi on the left.

You're right about the large amounts of mostly unexplored territory within Federation space. The Briar Patch was so close to Earth that Arik Soong was familiar with it during ENT, but Starfleet was so unfamiliar with it that they didn't realize the Sona and Baku were the same species until Insurrection.

Or situations like First Contact where the Neutral Zone and Bajor are apparently only a short trip from Earth to the point that both the Enterprise and Defiant could get there in time to meet the Borg Cube.

It definitely wasn't coincidence, as Gene Roddenberry referred to it as "Wagon Train to the stars" when pitching it to network heads.

I like to say that Star Trek is science fiction mixed in with some fantasy, and so I do get that, it's just I get nitpicky here because it's pretty much just all out fantasy now. They're in the 32nd century. Science is now magic. It's why I think they went too far, because we are Nuria in "Who Watches the Watchers" upon seeing Picard's ship, and her own home from space, and it's just hard for me to relate to the massive gap in technology and human development in any appreciable way.

The Defiant launching from DS9 as soon as the Borg were sighted heading towards Earth (or possibly just being in the neighborhood for an unrelated visit) is somewhat understandable, but the Enterprise abandoning it's assignment along the Romulan Neutral Zone at the beginning of the battle and arriving at Earth while the battle is still happening is preposterous.

You keep saying that, but what's really changed? There's programmable matter, but that's just 3D printing/slightly more advanced replicator technology. There's ships that can reconfigure themselves, but that's just glorified transformers and legos. Communicator badges have built in transporters and tricorders, but that's not too far from using your comm badge to tell someone else to beam you somewhere.

Not to mention that if it was convenient for the plot, then there'd be a communications lag with Starfleet, otherwise Kirk could get right through.