Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

Unless there's something tangible presented onscreen to suggest Tilly is lying, this sort of "speculation" makes you sound insane.

Background information that informs us about the character and their motivations is fine. This may be a bad example, but I’m going with it. The Joker in TDK tells different stories about how he got his scars. This tells the audience that he’s unreliable and probably a little nuts. The rest of his actions show us just how crazy he is. We don’t really need to see how he got his scars because it’s likely he did it himself. The one thing that is reliable about his story is that he’s telling us that something happened to him to make him so crazy. We can take him at his word on that one.

they also tend to project...

Maybe you all identify more with flaky people who allow their "cute" little quirks to distract from things that actually matter, but I have no use for them. Concentrate on the task at hand, or fuck off somewhere else while we find an adult to do your job.

Old Man Yells At Spaceship Show.

Garrett Wang, despite poor writing and, if rumors are correct, intentional sabotaging of his character by Berman and/or Braga, was able to show character growth despite writing saying something different. The actress that plays Tilly should take tips from him. However, it is the writer’s fault if the character is still, four years (? seasons?) later, acting like she has no confidence and needs constant reassurance.

The actress had no problem playing Mirror Universe Tilly differently, so I'm guessing it's the writers/producers fault.

If this arc doesn't end with Tilly opening a ripoff of the Autobot Matrix, and the DMA going "destiny....you cannot....defeat my...destinEEEEEEE!!!!! *explodes*" I'll be kinda bummed.

Related: Where the fuck is that Fortress Tiberius figure?

Oko got more backstory in an emergency (again). It was about - I can't remember, but it had to do with how something in her past related to the present.

That's what I call character development. Sensational episode.

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"Zora, I'm sure it's a fascinating experience, but perhaps you should deactivate your emotion subroutines for now."

Now the computer needs therapy mid-crisis? Discovery really has taken sappy and soapy to new heights. I've been fairly generous this season but boy, this rubbed me the wrong way.

- Pity it wasn't Nagilum. I was waiting for the DOT's camera to show Discovery ahead of it.
- Grey / Zora stuff in the bar was fine.
- Book - meh. Don't care.
- Starfleet - are you aware that one of the primary ships you have investigating the DMA is run by a sentient superintelligence that is exploring it's emotions and may have absorbed a touch too much angst of it's crew? Look into that!

The mystery box gets the perfunctory nudge with only two episodes to go before the primary reveal, followed by a two-part finale extravaganza. Can't say the extra-galactic tidbit did much to tantalise me.

As always, there are some decent moments sprinkled in there. A lot fewer this time round, unfortunately. My viewing experience with Disco tends to be when they go big on Burnham, I go sour. I might have liked the episode more had it not got in it's own way with the usual saccharine twaddle.

Anybody mention that this episode was tied into one of the Short Treks?

Now the dam computer needs therapy. Good grief.

Mullets aren't a good look in any century.

That episode was at least more "Star Trekky" than some of its predecessors, but the story was certainly nothing we haven't seen before. Ship trapped in an anomaly? How original.

The idea of what happens when a computer is imbued with actual intelligence is a very Star Trek thing to explore.

One thing -- is there a piece of backstory I missed that explains why Owosekun was apologizing to Saru? She said it, but then the story she told didn't have an obvious connection.

Data, turn of your emotion chip.

I wonder who the lucky recipient of Disco's inappropriately timed on-the-fly character "development" will be next week?

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Nilsson: "Dark energy shockwave impact in 90 seconds."

Burnham: "Saru, how are we looking?"

Saru: "I would say our chances of survival are 50%"

Burnham: "That'll have to do. Shields to ma -"

Nilsson: "Captain?"

Burnham: "Yes commander?"

Nilsson: "When I was in my early twenties on a trip to East Africa, I saw a gazelle giving birth... It was truly amazing. "

Burnham: "Incredible. Time to impact?"

Nilsson: "40 seconds. Anyway, within minutes, the baby was standing up—standing up on its own. A few more minutes, and it was walking. And before I knew it it was running alongside its mother, moving away with the herd."

Burnham: "What you're saying is - you've stumbled and ... made mistakes since we arrived in the future. I'm sure most of us have felt that way before we found our footing. But we're going to learn from those mistakes. That's what being human -- hey, did we raise the shi --"

I think the biggest issue I've been having with Discovery since last season is that the tech just isn't all that impressive. Those fuckers went 900 years into the future. And yeah, yeah... we can talk about The Burn and how it stunted interplanetary travel, but that still shouldn't stop technological advancement.

Compare human civilization in 2021 to 1121. For someone from the 12th century, today would be unrecognizable.

Compare human civilization in 1300 to 400. After the fall of Rome, technological advancement had a huge gap.

Thank you for calling it a photonic flare, instead of a warp flare.

Old greenie could use some of that there programmable matter.

It depends on the exact 900 years, I'd think. The 20th century had some revolutionary technological leaps at a level that you don't see every century, or even every millenia. I could imagine someone travelling from 800 to 1700 and complaining that muskets are just smaller fancier cannons or noisier crossbows.

From what Q told Picard in All Good Things, I'd imagine the next step for humanity and human-ish species is probably evolving into Q-like energy beings, and humanity is probably a long way off from that mentally.

I'm not talking about human evolution; I'm talking about technological progression.

The issue is that by 23rd century (at least in the Trek universe) we have technology like warp drive, transporters, replicators, etc.

Flash forward 900 years and you still have the same basic technology, but just shinier? Bullshit.

The comparison between 800 and 1700 by those standards doesn't even come close.

400 to 1300. Same technology.

Due to a disruption in stable governing bodies.

The burn is akin to the fall of Rome.

Same technology, my ass.

800's - invention of gun powder
900's - invention of the windmill
1000's - invention of the compass
1200's - invention of the mechanical clock

Please feel free to weigh in when you actually know what you're talking about.

I mean...

-Books ship has a slipstream drive, even if benamite crystals are still rare
-Transwarp conduits are everywhere, even if they're hazardous because they're full of debris
-Temporal technology is extremely advanced, even though it's outlawed
-transporter technology that used to require an entire room fits into a comm badge, and beaming around a ship (extremely dangerous in Kirk's time) is no big deal now
-sensors can immediately tell if someone is from the mirror universe
-medical technology that can place a trill symbiont into a human host indefinitely (unheard of during TNG)

Just because the Starfleet experience looks similar to the casual observer doesn't mean a lot hasn't changed under the surface. If you told someone that we used computers to help us reach the moon in the 60's, and today I can watch television on the computer in my pocket, would they truly grasp the massive leap forward in computer technology between those two things?

And no doubt technology from the year ~3200 would be unrecognizable to us, were we to find ourselves that far into the future. Think back to when TNG was airing and the thin computer terminal on his desk. Seemed incredibly futuristic at the time. Now? Less than 40 years later, you can buy a laptop with a thinner form-factor for less than $500. We've got smartphones that can do everything the PADDs they carried around can do.

If you wanted to do a series that gave us a realistic look at what tech might be like in the year 3200, I doubt if anyone would want to watch it. For starters, the characters would probably not even be human. They'd be androids made of reprogrammable matter, who'd probably all just fuse together into a lump attached to a drive system when they wanted to go into space. There'd be no sexy control rooms, no flashing displays, no holodecks, no shiny weapons, and other things that we're accustomed to in SF. Just amorphous blobs who transformed themselves into different things as the need arose.

That's assuming, of course, we see the kind of technological progression we got with Trek, which wasn't realistic or consistent. Warp drive is supposed to be developed around 2065, and then, just a few years later, a ship travels 25K lightyears to the edge of the galaxy!

The lack of super gee-whiz tech, however, isn't necessarily wrong, even if you leave in the constraint that we'll still be human in the 3200s. For most of human history, it's taken a very long time for there to be significant leaps in technology, even ignoring the technological regressions that have happened along the way. Consider ships. Sailing ships were little changed, except for things like size, for centuries. Then we figured out how to make moveable sails so that we could tack against the wind. That happened somewhere between the 2nd and 6th centuries CE. Sails remained the prime motive power for ships until the 19th Century, and except in the cases of nuke-powered aircraft carriers and submarines, all powered ships use some variation of the internal combustion engine (which was invented in the 19th Century). The next expected power plant innovation for ships will be either hydrogen or battery-based unless someone cracks building compact thorium or fusion reactors. I doubt if we'll ever see technology advance beyond those. The same is true of planes, trains, and automobiles. Sure, we'll get mag-lev trains, and planes that use some kind of novel jet technology combined with a compact nuclear reactor or hydrogen, but without developing genuine anti-gravity technology, we're going to hit a wall with what we can do.

The same is true of space travel. If it's impossible for us to find a way around the speed of light, and I'm including warp drives in that, then most likely, we'll be stuck puttering around our solar system ala The Expanse until we shed our bodies and become androids who don't care that a trip will take a 100 years or so, while thousands of years pass on Earth.

An outside observer would probably see a gun as just a flashier crossbow, a mechanical clock as a fancy miniaturized sundial, a compass as some kind of weird looking star map.