Barely an inconvenience!

Gene would have loved Discovery because it let characters say “fuck” and there’s nothing and no one Gene hated more than the censors.

Don’t you also imagine future developments of the stories you enjoy? I’m already imagining what Starfleet Academy is going to give us, doesn’t matter if it’s a prequel or not. I just have to set my imagined version aside when the actual show airs.

That’s very true, Kelvin Kirk is much more obnoxious than I believe prime Kirk would have been as a cadet. I’m not even sure Kelvin Kirk has the necessary charm to argue his way out of trouble the way prime Kirk did. If the attack on Vulcan hadn’t interrupted, I could see the academy authorities coming down pretty hard on him.

This is how I see it. Reprogramming the test was a protest, and protests should be loud and obvious. A subtle change that made the test just barely passable would have just looked like academic dishonesty.

Any time they bleed red instead of fuchsia is an unforgivable violation of the sacred canon.

Kirk didn’t die in that movie. It looked like he did, but he can’t have. He wasn’t alone.

We’re there already. Look no further than your smart phone. You can’t explain that to someone from 100 years ago and have them come away with anything more meaningful than “magic”.

I’m rewatching season 3 now, and the themes of trauma and mental health are so pervasive that I think it was really appropriate that the burn would be the result of a mental health crisis in one way or another. In that context, I think putting a face to it works. The “Force of Nature” or old-school Borg route could work great, but for a different show/season.

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Agreed, Discovery has really only scratched the surface of what can be done with the Federation’s rebuilding itself, Earth’s new isolationist tendencies, and the unified Vulcan/Romulan society. It’d be a shame to leave all that behind. Plus, we still need to learn what’s become of the Klingons!

I’m 100% here for your vision of the Academy series.

Gay men are men, trans women are women.

Not 100%, but I feel the author may just be engaging in some Kira/Dax shipping. Which wouldn’t jibe great with the canon, but when has that ever stopped a good ship?

I agree completely. The planet Michael and Book settled on was beautiful, the makeup was well done, the new uniforms were nifty, but what was the point of it all? That one day Michael will be old and nostalgic? I didn’t need to be told that. And I definitely didn’t need the half hearted Calypso tie-in. It was just disturbing watching Michael smilingly order a sentient intelligence to suffer a thousand years of loneliness for no reason that we or she knows.

The wedding and beach scenes were lovely and were already the perfect note to leave on.

Yeah, I’m clearly in the minority, and I might just be too forgiving of the TOS era movies. I’m certainly not as inclined to give a break to Insurrection or Nemesis. But if you do give it another chance, I hope you enjoy it a bit more this time!

I’ll give it a go:

I like that it’s about exploration. Even if it’s Sybok forcing the expedition to begin with, Kirk does ultimately make the choice to go along with it. No other Trek movie is actually about seeking out a strange new world.

I like the shore leave scenes. I hear a lot of complaints about them, but I appreciate spending a little time with the our characters just being dysfunctional friends.

I like that it makes full use of DeForest Kelley. His “pain” scene is excellent, and his frequent exasperation with Kirk is sold very well throughout the film. Say what you will about Shatner’s ego, but he gets that Kirk can be a petulant child at times, and needs McCoy to verbally smack some sense into him, as in the brig scene.

For that matter, I like Kirk’s pain speech. A little sermonising, maybe, but that’s Trek for you. It works well enough considering that two films ago this man was forced to abandon his estranged son’s corpse on an exploding planet. Insisting on holding on to that pain is substantial, but very Kirk.

I enjoy the entire meeting with God. A little goofy, but terrifically quotable.

I do see plenty of faults. A lot of the humour doesn’t land. Introducing our new hero ship as a piece of junk is immediately off-putting. The Scotty/Uhura pairing comes out of nowhere and ultimately goes nowhere. The ground assault sequence was disappointingly underwhelming. The effects are weak af, and if I saw it on release in theatres I’d probably feel pretty sour towards the apparent trajectory of the series towards something that felt more direct-to-video.

But I never have a bad time watching it. The good outweighs the bad for me.

I don’t think any rewrite would be needed. Almost the whole season was filmed not knowing it was the last. The few scenes they filmed with that knowledge were just to put a nice cap on the series. Probably something like the last scene in All Good Things, which wouldn’t have prevented a TNG season 8 if the winds suddenly changed.

That said, I think the most we can hope for is for this to encourage them to incorporate more Disco elements into Academy. I don’t see them backing down on this being the final season.

Now that I’ve thought about it some more, it’s unlikely the movies would be making any decisions based off of what’s best for the streaming shows. That would probably be seen as the tail wagging the dog.

That said, I’ve definitely encountered people who enjoyed the films but skipped the shows on account of not knowing where to start and finding the relationship too confusing. It would make sense to pair a successful “early days” movie with an “early days” spinoff series to lure some of that casual audience to streaming.

Having TV and film Star Trek exist in separate timelines seems like a bad approach for getting people invested in the franchise as a whole. I wonder if that’s the reasoning for the early Federation time period. People who have only watched the Kelvin films can understand it as a prequel to those, but elements from it could just as easily spin-off into a streaming show without issue.