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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Watched the first two episodes on Crave. I've been immersed in Star Trek the last year or two, with binge-watching TOS and TNG on Netflix, and starting into DS9. So I'm coming to this from the context of the Star Trek legacy. My thoughts:
The Good
* Production values are excellent. It looks feature-film quality.
* Acting is good. Especially by Star Trek standards (though that's damning with faint praise).
* Lead role seems interesting and is well-acted.
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I partially agree, I thought the best acting came from the Science officer, I thought Michelle Yeoh was just awkward, and Michael was ok. The Klingons just couldn't act through the makeup.
I ended up not feeling a lot of sympathy in the end for Michael. In my mind she was just stupid in terms of her reasoning, and also in terms of her execution.
I did like a lot of the production values of the show. I can't say I was still overly crazy about the Klingon Ship designs, what previous series did was make the Klingon Ships Iconic. The first time we saw a D-7 cruisers in the Original series they just looked deadly. Or the First time we saw a Bird Of Prey, frankly I fell in love with that ship. The people that designed the Klingon ships in those series had a real sense of what Klingon's were and their ships became an iconic part of that Lore. I wasn't nuts about the Sarcophagus ####, but the Klingon Fleet just felt generic. I did like however the Star Fleet ship designs.
The battle was ok, but it wasn't anything all that new, it was a shaky cam battle.
And I was waiting for Michael to be sentenced to the Phantom Zone at the end of her trial, because that courtroom looked like the opening scene of the first superman movie.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
The Meh
* Klingons seem genuinely alien, which is cool. The Klingon speech grew tiresome, though.
* Besides the lead and the scaredy-cat alien, the rest of the cast is a blank slate at this point. You'd think we'd have some sense of the crew after two full episodes.
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I don't mind that they tried to alien up the aliens so to speak, but I do believe that the makeup actually hurt the Klingons, it was to me too heavy and just too much man in a mask monster of the week. The actors tried really hard to emote thought the makeup and just couldn't do anything. There just didn't seem to be any passion coming from these aliens. They're Klingon's they're an aggressive combative xenophobic species, and instead we got far eastern philosophy and a real difficulty in conveying emotion. Hopefully they find a way to lighten up the makeup.
As for the Bridge crew, yeah, outside of the Cow alien and the Captain and First officer, the rest didn't standout, even the attempts at light bridge conversation seemed forced. But this should fix itself. I did like the android alien, he can probably hold a few thousand of the Captain's favorite music and he's probably Android Auto compatible.
The Bad
* The writing is terrible. I can't recall any movie or TV show that had so much clumsy exposition. "As you know, we're on this planet to identity the blah-blah-blah." "As you know, I'm from XYZ planet, where we're all either predator or prey. I was prey. That means my character is cautious to the point of annoyance, etc. etc."
* For a pair of action-oriented episodes, very little actually happened. They came across a beacon. A bunch of Klingons showed up. Space battle. The end.
My overall impression is somewhat negative. Star Trek lives and dies by its writing, and Discovery is not off to a good start so far. More importantly, Discovery doesn't feel like Star Trek. It feels more like a Marvel movie. Or the bad Star Trek movies. It doesn't feel like an optimistic TV show that will place science, exploration, and moral dilemmas at the centre. Frankly, the Orville feels a lot more like Star Trek to me than Discovery.[/QUOTE]
I didn't like the writing because at key points, the mutiny the flight out in a space suit, it just didn't make any sense and it was just poorly executed.