the Cunning Linguist wrote:
Yeah, I was a little disappointed myself. I think the 950 years into the future premise wasn't believable. Really, do they need zippers and seams on clothes when they have interactive matter and nanobots? The first scene with the Indian guy and the floating desk and interactive matter was cool and believable as being well into the future, but after that, not so much. Think back 900 years ago (no, I wasn't there) and today's technology would be all witchcraft and sorcery; when McCoy was brought back in time to the 20th century, he deemed surgery with knives and sutures as barbaric; Scotty tried speaking into a mouse to interact with a PC. If people from the 1100AD saw the kinds of weapons we have today, they'd have surrendered in heartbeat. How could a dhow from the Ming Dynasty have stood up to a modern warship? Not a chance... and that's only 600 years difference... I saw very little of that on the show.
I get the feeling that storylines are wrapped up by season's end in the event that the show gets axed; there's less online harassment for the show to be revived. I didn't mind Burnham's storyline but to see her get [spoiler alert] tapped for Captain was entirely predictable but unnecessary. Really? In the 33rd century, they couldn't find a better Captain for that post?
As for the SFX, I've all but given up on trying to spot the mistakes in CGI or separating the CGI from practical effects; they're just too good. I've heard that something like 90% of what we see on the Mandalorian is CGI...
It's kinda neat though what some of the costume designers did for the newfangled uniforms. I saw a quick video about it on IG and the lead designer said they used a variety of methods not normally associated with costume design, like using 3-D printers for some of the elements. Only gripe I have with the new suits is that they're...REALLY gray. Just go with black, folks. It's much more flattering. And Trek has gotten into a lot of trouble when they try going a little too futuristic--Roddenberry insisted the TNG uniforms be made of spandex, which led to all kinds of problems behind the scenes. There's a reason those finally got ditched and they went with regular wool getups in season 3.
As for technological progress, you make a valid point, but I'd just like to point out that measuring progress ain't quite as cut-and-dried as comparing us to, say, Medieval times. There have obviously been big leaps over the course of human progress, but the twentieth century blew everything we know away. In the 1800s, for instance, medical technology was horribly outdated. They were still "bleeding people" and treating ill folks with fucking strychnine FFS. Also, some technologies progress faster than others, and some progress to a certain point and then...stop altogether. Look how boats haven't really evolved a ton in the last couple thousand years, and yet it took us roughly 66 years to go from flying an airplane for the first time to landing on the goddamned moon.
But I will say that it seemed kinda ridiculous to me too that the galaxy had been using warp drive and dilithium crystals for well over 1000 years and they...never found anything better? Nothing? The spore drive is still, like, the most advanced form of propulsion ever 1000+ years later...? Also, I thought it was implied in TNG that they had figured out how to make their own dilithium. Oh well, as contrived as the major maguffin it was sometimes, it was still kinda neat seeing a Star Trek story where the characters didn't have a Federation or Starfleet to lean back on. Voyager could have and should have had storytelling on this level, but for some weird reason...they didn't.
As far as serialized storylines go, they should take a page out of DS9's book. A lot of episodes were self-contained but a lot of them furthered a larger storyline. And unlike TNG and their super-annoying season finale cliffhangers, DS9 would definitely leave a lot of things up in the, but you felt satisfied with the storyline and season as a whole.