S03.E07: Unification III

[Kromm]

On 11/29/2020 at 10:03 AM, Llywela said:

As far as not knowing much about the bridge crew goes, that's because the bridge crew are not the main cast of this show. We've always known that. They are background supporting characters, like Joe Carey in Voyager, or like O'Brien and Keiko were in TNG.

That's only a problem in the sense in that the show (and let's be honest, lots of Star Trek) have to jump through ludicrous hoops to keep things focused on the main cast.  This thing with Tilly is just a particularly egregious example.  If this were any other position other than Captain or First Officer, it wouldn't be so ridiculous.  I could see an Acting Chief Science Officer, or even an Acting Chief Engineer being promoted out of the box.  But this doesn't just go out of the box, it tramples the box to bits.  

On 11/26/2020 at 6:39 AM, ottoDbusdriver said:

Really ?  Her mom ?  Really ?

And as ridiculous as that is, somehow it's not the most ridiculous thing in this episode.  Incredibly.

[Llywela]

14 minutes ago, Kromm said:

That's only a problem in the sense in that the show (and let's be honest, lots of Star Trek) have to jump through ludicrous hoops to keep things focused on the main cast.  This thing with Tilly is just a particularly egregious example.  If this were any other position other than Captain or First Officer, it wouldn't be so ridiculous.  I could see an Acting Chief Science Officer, or even an Acting Chief Engineer being promoted out of the box.  But this doesn't just go out of the box, it tramples the box to bits.  

Yeah, but it's clearly the beginning of a story arc and we don't yet know where they intend to take that story (will Tilly succeed as first officer? Will she be a disaster? Will Saru face consequences for poor judgement or be proved right in his choice?), so I'm prepared to reserve full judgement until I see how this develops along the way.

[Kromm]

10 minutes ago, Ottis said:

Well, it didn't happen so much the first three episodes of this season, which made this season my favorite. It reared its head on the Trill world, and since then, you are right, we are back to Michael being a Special Snowflake. And it is so disappointing to me.

Because aside from the Michael Worship, this season of Discovery is filled with a lot of love and purpose. It's like someone finally "got" that Star Trek is about ideals and the people who uphold them, and the connection and interaction of those people. The Federation has never been perfect, but overall its goals are noble and it has stood as a beacon for planets and species who want to grow. I love that. It's why some of those references this season bring a tear to my eye.

As did the "say yes" scene. People who support each other, trying to do the right thing for the group. Even if the Vulcan/Romulans no longer believe "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (and how many thousands of viewers, at that moment, in their heads said, "... or the one"?). 

If any of the Discovery crew people want to lock Michael in the brig for a while, until everyone agrees that her every utterance and desire isn't magical and necessary, I would be OK with that. Book and Grudge can join her, I'm not heartless.

I get the objection, I really do, but the one thing I rarely see are realistic suggestions on how to fix this problem. Like it or not, she's the main character of the show.  Like it or not, the show already dug a trench in terms of how they use her.  Although I'd argue that by starting with everyone hating her guts, it's not as overwhelming as people act like it is. In fact, I'd say part of the blame for how over the top they went with Michael being lionized in this series was because they overdid how vilified she was first... well... in universe at least.  It was always a stupid idea to introduce a main character that way, and yet they did it.  Leaving them to feel obligated to dig her out in such a way that both the home audience and people on screen would love her.

I will say that I do think that the way she's linked to Spock, a much beloved character, while always a risky move by the show given how totally he acted like she never existed in every other incarnation, didn't turn out quite as badly as I'd personally feared.  And at the very least, the people on Ni'Var (I'm never going to get adjusted to that name, I think) reacting to that link isn't necessarily bad writing.  

To answer my own initial statement about suggestions, I really do think it's more like locking the writers in the brig rather than Michael.  While I've gone on previously about how the show always bends itself into a pretzel for the protagonist--really all of the shows have done this except for Deep Space Nine and to an extent, Voyager, although it's worth noting that even DS9 made their male lead a literal Messiah--I do think that there are a few things that just need to be pounded into writer's heads.

1.) Inspirational speeches are bull.  The little moment a few episodes back where we got Adira literally saying this got forgotten pretty quickly, didn't it?  It shows that the writers are somewhat aware of the problem with them, but think just acting humorously self aware about the situation solves it.  
2.) Outright praise of the characters on screen is bull. Nhan's little goodbye speech was all kinds of mistake.  Ultimately it seems like a lot of viewers just hold it against Burnham, but it's just bad writing.  The best goodbye between those characters would have been more of a shorthand.  If Starfleet actually saluted (pretty sure they don't) then that would have been the shorthand.  But barring that, something else to show respect to Burnham without the layers of bullshit.  
3.) The show shouldn't reward intangibles.  Michael's intangible leader qualities annoy because they're largely intangible.  Arguably the episode where we saw her commanding the bridge was the first time we ever saw that, and it made her come off well, but perhaps it was a case of too little too late. Especially since by the very next episode we just got shown what a maverick she is instead.  

There are probably a few more of these, and it's likely too late for Burnham to ever recover the respect of a lot of viewers, but maybe some of these things need to go in a writer's bible for a future show.

[paigow]

15 minutes ago, Kromm said:

There are probably a few more of these, and it's likely too late for Burnham to ever recover the respect of a lot of viewers

Now that holodeck technology has advanced 800 years from TNG, she needs an equivalent of Vic Fontaine or Joe Piscopo to interact with as a normal, non-martyred, non-saviour individual...

[Kromm]

1 hour ago, paigow said:

Now that holodeck technology has advanced 800 years from TNG, she needs an equivalent of Vic Fontaine or Joe Piscopo to interact with as a normal, non-martyred, non-saviour individual...

If the idea is to have a neutral party call her out on her bullshit, the problem is that her in-universe bullshit is very different from what's disliked about her outside of it.  In universe her bullshit is being headstrong, rebellious and yet always eventually right.  Out universe her bullshit dovetails with that only in the "always right" part, since the other issues are mainly with how people around her react to her.

If there'd been a character around her that served as a true sounding board for her all along perhaps this problem wouldn't exist.  On deeper reflection, while I still think it's a bit unfair to give the Kirks of the show a pass and come down so hard on the Burnhams, it does occur to me that McCoy was Kirk's sounding board.  Not that he ever actually changed Kirk's mind, but at least it projected to the viewing audience as Kirk having someone around questioning his wisdom.  

But at this late date I'm not sure there's enough to grab onto, as I said, because calling her out for being rebellious is hardly what most viewers want to hear. They want her to either just go away at this point, or somehow workably in show not be lauded, not be right, and yet also somehow not be so invalidated as a character that we instead tail off into some "woe-is-me what did I do" mode, something I think we all know will bother the viewing audience just as much if they have to sit through it. 

[Ottis]

2 hours ago, Kromm said:

I get the objection, I really do, but the one thing I rarely see are realistic suggestions on how to fix this problem. Like it or not, she's the main character of the show.  Like it or not, the show already dug a trench in terms of how they use her. 

You don't have to look far. Look at the first three episodes of this season. Michael was on an adventure, Discovery was on an adventure, they both were trying to connect. They did fairly quickly, and Michael was back *but* she wasn't where everyone turned for answers. In fact, it wasn't even clear who she was anymore, after a year on her own. All that was terrific.

And then ... the show fell into old patterns. Michael solves everything. Michael is wise. Michael doesn't  follow orders, but that's Ok, she knows best. A token demotion from a job she isn't even sure she wants, and it's all good. Then she is off to solve it all for the team. Her MOM shows up. Her BROTHER is the key to solving a near civil war and ONLY Michael can fix it. Michael falls in love. Michael has a crisis of purpose. Michael is everyone's big sister and mentor.

It doesn't have to be this way. Spock can be important without Michael (the sister few know) holding the sole key to success. Someone else can be the mentor. Someone else can be the truth teller advocate. Someone else can fall in love.

Being the central character doesn't mean everything that happens, happens with her or for her or because of her.

I very much *liked* the Michael of the first three episodes. She was happier, more clear on her purpose, less angst over decisions. I thought the show had figured it out. Then bam! Right back to where we were before.

BTW, comparing her to Kirk isn't fair. Kirk didn't have an answer for everything. McCoy sometimes did (and he called Kirk on the carpet), Spock often did, Scotty occasionally did. Kirk actually was a hothead who acted before he thought. That's Ok. Propelling the show forward is OK. Being the sole individual with the right answer is grating. 

 

[LittleIggy]

On 11/26/2020 at 3:30 AM, paigow said:

Things have really changed if humans can join ancient Romulan organizations...

That was the exact thing I thought! Ancient Romulan organizations let random human strangers join them? Seriously? 🙄 Of course, St. Michael saves the day again because she is the Mary Sue-est Mary Sue ever. At least we won’t have to listen to her whine about not fitting in anymore. If it weren’t for Saru and Georgiou, I wouldn’t bother watching.

[KimberStormer]

9 hours ago, Kromm said:

To answer my own initial statement about suggestions, I really do think it's more like locking the writers in the brig rather than Michael.

I definitely do not dislike Michael at all.  I think she's a great character.  I agree with you, I think it's the writers.  Their main failing with Michael, to my mind, is that they know they want to make her the protagonist, but they don't really understand how that works.  Protagonist literally means something like "first mover", but so often how they make Michael important is not by her being the first mover but by someone else making her important.  And we can easily see through this as being the writers making her important by having someone else say so.  In fact, they did the same with Pike once, when Admiral Cornwell was like "STARFLEET HAD TO SAVE YOU FROM THE WAR CHRIS BECAUSE YOU'RE THE BEST OF US."  But mostly, although I haaaaaaaaaaaate Pike, they did it right with him: it wasn't Pike who was getting messages from heaven and who was related to Star Trek royalty and who was told "it's always been about you" by dying cyborgs.  They didn't think they had to do those things because they already had a protagonist for the show.  So he was just doing stuff, acting, making choices, etc., the stuff a main character is supposed to do.

[LittleIggy]

I love Anson Mount’s Pike.

[huahaha]

The writers of this episode are clearly TNG fans, so they should know that the first officer runs the whole damn ship! Someone with no management experience can't do that job, no matter how much you like them personally. And choosing someone who's still meek and uncertain is just bananas.

And no, showing that Tilly wants the job someday is not the same as setting it up narratively. TNG knew how to do this -- Deanna Troi got stuck as the highest ranked officer on the bridge, made tough command decisions, THEN decided to take command training. We didn't wake up one day to First Officer Troi.

Why not have Tilly finish her training (could be one episode) and get promoted and then trap her on the bridge to prove herself. As is, Saru has given command of the ship to his favorite rather than someone who actually knows how to do the job.

 

[Llywela]

3 hours ago, huahaha said:

The writers of this episode are clearly TNG fans, so they should know that the first officer runs the whole damn ship! Someone with no management experience can't do that job, no matter how much you like them personally. And choosing someone who's still meek and uncertain is just bananas.

And no, showing that Tilly wants the job someday is not the same as setting it up narratively. TNG knew how to do this -- Deanna Troi got stuck as the highest ranked officer on the bridge, made tough command decisions, THEN decided to take command training. We didn't wake up one day to First Officer Troi.

Why not have Tilly finish her training (could be one episode) and get promoted and then trap her on the bridge to prove herself. As is, Saru has given command of the ship to his favorite rather than someone who actually knows how to do the job.

Your suggestion would be a good one if this were TNG, playing out an entire character story in a single episode, but Discovery is more serialised than that, so is always going to take a different approach.

Like I said above, we have no idea yet what the narrative plan for this scenario actually is. We are still at the very beginning of the story. But the fact that Tilly's lack of experience has already been lampshaded in the text of the show makes clear that the writers haven't forgotten about it. They are telling a different story than was told with Troi, but that doesn't automatically make it a bad story. We've no way of knowing at this point what the story will be at all. It could be a story about Tilly taking to the role like a duck to water, to be sure, but that doesn't seem likely, given that most of the character stories this season seem to be about the characters feeling out of place and in over their heads. Saru is struggling to adjust to the responsibilities of command, Michael is struggling to fit back in aboard Discovery, so there is every chance Tilly's story from here will be about struggling to cope with a level of responsibility she wasn't ready for, and the knock on effect this has both on her confidence and her relationships with the rest of the crew. I mean, given that we already know Tilly wants to be a captain someday, but that she didn't get to complete her command training because of jumping forward in time, how badly would she take it if being given this level of responsibility too soon leads to failure? What impact would that have on her ambitions? It isn't hard to think of strong directions this storyline could be taken in, instead of simply condemning it up front.

We'll have to wait and see. I just don't feel we should be too hasty to jump to the worst conclusions about a storyline we haven't seen yet. Better to see how it plays out and then assess it once all the facts are available.

[Quilt Fairy]

13 hours ago, Llywela said:

It could be a story about Tilly taking to the role like a duck to water, to be sure, but that doesn't seem likely, given that most of the character stories this season seem to be about the characters feeling out of place and in over their heads

We will have to see.  To have Tilly say that one day she wants to be a Captain does not make it so.  (If it did, I would be younger, thinner, and have much better hair. )    

[KimberStormer]

19 hours ago, huahaha said:

And no, showing that Tilly wants the job someday is not the same as setting it up narratively. TNG knew how to do this -- Deanna Troi got stuck as the highest ranked officer on the bridge, made tough command decisions, THEN decided to take command training. We didn't wake up one day to First Officer Troi.

 

15 hours ago, Llywela said:

Your suggestion would be a good one if this were TNG, playing out an entire character story in a single episode, but Discovery is more serialised than that, so is always going to take a different approach.

Now that it's been suggested I think actually something like @huahaha's idea could work, and actually work well in the serialized Discovery style.  I think Tilly saying she wants the job is a good first step.  But it would have been great if she had been sort of thrown into a command role, of any kind, and thrived in it or anyway did a good job such that Saru could see her in the role.  Then some episodes later Michael gets 'demoted' or whatever and Saru goes for it.  That would be a multi-episode (really multi-season!) arc that would work for me.  It could help explain why the bridge crew would accept it, too.  Like they did a great job, actually, setting up Tilly as a good ambassador or diplomat type person when Saru took her along on his away mission in the second episode this season.  If he made her first contact specialist or something I would be totally fine with it because of that.  So something like that, except where she shows leadership.

Oh well.  It's true we don't know where this is going.  But we don't need to know the outcome to know there's no real reason for Saru to have picked her or for the rest of the crew to be totally cool with her being promoted over their heads.

[huahaha]

Yeah, there's no payoff or explanation for the Tilly promotion that would make sense. The answer is, she's a lead actress and they need someone to fill the chair until they introduce a new character like they did with Pike last season. But that's super lazy and disrespectful of viewers.

It's like Picard picking Wesley Crusher as number 1 because the show runners are waiting for another actor's contract to start the next week. If you want to do that, you need to create an emergency, not make it look like a well-considered decision.

The writers could've given it to Stametz for the week and then had him glad to get back to engineering.

 

[Quilt Fairy]

13 hours ago, huahaha said:

The writers could've given it to Stametz for the week and then had him glad to get back to engineering.

Does anyone remember Murphy Brown with Candace Bergen?  One of the recurring jokes was that every week Murphy had a different secretary. 

[thecdn]

On 11/26/2020 at 1:09 PM, Kromm said:

It's one of the most absurd things this show has done. I know it's a reduced crew size but there have to be a dozen officers sight unseen out ranking her. Then again the stupid newer movies had Kirk jumping like 5 ranks. Ugh. 

Yes! Exactly. There is no way she should be considered for the position. She is literally the most inexperienced person he could have picked. Any of the regular bridge crew would be a better pick.

It was bad enough that  Kirk, who just graduated from the Academy, to assume command of Enterprise in the midst of a total disaster but to leave him there afterward? There was no one else in Star Fleet more suitable? I cringe every time I think about this.

[Kromm]

1 hour ago, thecdn said:

Yes! Exactly. There is no way she should be considered for the position. She is literally the most inexperienced person he could have picked. Any of the regular bridge crew would be a better pick.

It was bad enough that  Kirk, who just graduated from the Academy, to assume command of Enterprise in the midst of a total disaster but to leave him there afterward? There was no one else in Star Fleet more suitable? I cringe every time I think about this.

That last is why I could never get on board with the reboot movie series. The Kirk thing wasn't just bullshit, it was totally unnecessary bullshit. Nothing in the premise demanded that he be a freaking cadet, not even officially an Ensign yet if I recall correctly, and rolled into that first movie's plot. Even if they insisted on him being a troubled dick, compared to the original Kirk, he still could have had other assignments and a bit of rank and just been posed as a malcontent who didn't go as far as Shatner's version. THEN promoted out of the box in a crisis. 

This crap with Tilly has almost the same stench. 

[catsitter]

In season 1, they showed that Vulcans can create a link where they can connect psychically with someone instantaneously across space (Sarek did this with Michael), so all this season, I had been wondering why the Federation hadn't set up a network of such psychically linked Vulcans across the galaxy after the Burn, since they have such trouble with communications now, but I suppose it is explained now that we know that they have left the Federation.  Still, in this episode, if the quorum wanted to know whether Michael was telling the truth, and what her motives were, why didn't they use the Vulcan mind meld?

[Tyro49]

I still wonder why Starfleet hasn't used the blueprints/specs of the spore drive to make more versions of it for their other ships.

[clyo22]

On 12/9/2020 at 12:15 AM, catsitter said:

In season 1, they showed that Vulcans can create a link where they can connect psychically with someone instantaneously across space (Sarek did this with Michael), so all this season, I had been wondering why the Federation hadn't set up a network of such psychically linked Vulcans across the galaxy after the Burn, since they have such trouble with communications now, but I suppose it is explained now that we know that they have left the Federation.  Still, in this episode, if the quorum wanted to know whether Michael was telling the truth, and what her motives were, why didn't they use the Vulcan mind meld?

Earth also left the Federation but we still see humans in Starfleet. There should still be Vulcans, Andorians and some mixed people in Starfleet/in the Federation.

[Llywela]

16 hours ago, Tyro49 said:

I still wonder why Starfleet hasn't used the blueprints/specs of the spore drive to make more versions of it for their other ships.

I dunno, one of the major throughlines of S1-2 was how extremely experimental and controversial the spore drive was and how very difficult it was to make it work, requiring either the enslavement of a a sentient species or genetic alteration of a human navigator - plus, there was that whole thing about damaging the mycelial network with every jump, not to mention that the spore drive was how Discovery ended up stranded in the Mirror universe and then jumped home to find they'd skipped forward in time a bunch of months. Wasn't it stated on-screen that the technology would not be pursued and all research notes strictly embargoed, for all those reasons? Maybe Vance has looked at these problems and decided his scanty resources are best spent elsewhere.

Edited December 21, 2020 by Llywela

[Clanstarling]

On 11/26/2020 at 9:09 PM, ACW said:

  Am I the only one who's really annoyed that Michael and Sari are unreservedly vouching for the nobility and trustworthiness of an organization whose current incarnation they barely know?  Especially since they knew about Section 31 even back in their own time? For all they know, Section 31 caused the Burn, and is all that survived.  At minimum, we've at least got Evil Admiral Syndrome to worry about.

Not the only one.

On 11/27/2020 at 6:16 AM, Llywela said:

 My only real bugbear with Michael is the way she delivers all her lines in that breathy, melodramatic whisper instead of just talking normally!

That is really starting to grate. It's like everything she said is a secret and she's angry while saying it. Part of the reason Burnham on drugs was so fun - she spoke like a normal person.

On 11/28/2020 at 2:46 PM, tkc said:

Enjoyed this episode, with the tie-in references. Nice to hear the acknowledgment of the late Anton Yelchin (Chekov from the Abrams universe) with a starship named USS Yelchin.

I caught that, it was touching.