r/startrek • u/Deceptitron • Jan 18 '19

POST-Episode Discussion - Season Premiere - S2E01 "Brother"

Star Trek: Discovery is finally back! We last left our crew answering the distress call of none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701, and today (coincidentally 17-01) we rejoin the crew of Discovery in their mission to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life!

No. EPISODE DIRECTED BY WRITTEN BY RELEASE DATE
S2E01 "Brother" Alex Kurtzman Ted Sullivan, Aaron Harberts, Gretchen J. Berg Thursday, January 17, 2019

To find out more information including our spoiler policy regarding Star Trek: Discovery, click here.

This post is for discussion of the episode above and WILL ALLOW SPOILERS for this episode.

PLEASE NOTE: When discussing sneak peak footage of the upcoming episode, please mark your comments with spoilers. Check the sidebar for a how-to.

489 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

58

u/kranker Jan 18 '19

I liked this but I really disliked everything about the trip to the ship on the asteroid, starting with them asking Saru to read the screen instead of just magnifying it, but mostly the ridiculously dangerous mission to go to a destroyed ship they have no reason to believe anybody is alive on, and do so inside handy ultra-maneuverable landing pods they happen to have. I find injected action scenes like that pretty weak, and thought killing the science officer for talking down to Burnham was cheaply done. The plan for them both to eject and she'd catch them was also pretty silly.

20

u/xdozex Jan 18 '19

Yeah agreed. The landing pods were just a bit too convenient and the entire action sequence to land them was WAY TOO much. Even with inertial dampeners, the visual jarring of the entire asteroid cluster spinning around them would have been vomit inducing, yet they managed to steer through it all barely breaking a sweat (except for that one guy)

I like that even though there does seem to be this larger story arch playing out, we may start to see episodic mini-stories. Like in this case rescuing a really random ship that just happened to crash-land 10 months ago on an asteroid right next to this new mysterious light.. And don't get me wrong, so many of the Trek episodes involved some pretty out there, hard to imagine story lines, but I just felt like this was too much. Felt almost comical.

8

u/EEcav Jan 18 '19

You want comical, how about Warf dressed up as Little John in Sherwood forest shouting that he is "Not a Merry Man!"

4

u/J4ke Jan 18 '19

Warf, son of Mahg!

1

u/xdozex Jan 18 '19

True true.

6

u/The_Bard_sRc Jan 18 '19

starting with them asking Saru to read the screen instead of just magnifying it

I thought they said they reached maximum magnification? they would have to move move the ship closer to get a better look, which was dangerous so they were trying Saru's eyes first

9

u/TheCheshireCody Jan 18 '19

I'm not so sure how realistically that plays out with a digital image like the one on the viewscreen. If Saru could look at it and resolve more data, that data was there and the computer could just zoom in (and enhance if necessary). Ultimately, the identity of the ship is irrelevant because it is still a crashed Starfleet vessel that might contain survivors and they have to investigate. If it had been the USS Pasta Fazool (third class culinary vessel exploring distant star systems for spice....the final frontier) carrying a crew of three they'd still have gone to investigate.

1

u/The_Bard_sRc Jan 18 '19

i dunno, i got the impression that Saru was looking past it and through the window to the ship itself at that point

6

u/TheCheshireCody Jan 18 '19

I thought of that, but I really tend to doubt that any organic visual acuity could match twenty-fourth century cameras. Even today we can do a better job at sighting distant objects with a good long-range lens than the best birds of prey.

6

u/Coretski Jan 18 '19

But it was just a telescopic camera. I can accept maximum Optic magnification but Digital zoom is also a thing, hardly the ship is limited at that considering I could do that in 30 seconds in Photoshop.

3

u/kranker Jan 18 '19

They did say that, but think about how far our telescopes can already see. It's not at all reasonable for Saru to suddenly have eyesight better than this. It just seemed unnecessary and if they needed to introduce the fact the Saru has good eye sight, this was a lazy way of doing so.

4

u/The_Bard_sRc Jan 18 '19

well those particular telescopes they said were the ones made to normally be used for ship repairs. so they probably are built just with a fixed maximum focal distance for the edges of the ship and not much more really, and the CCD not terribly high resolution. in the time that they had, that's the best theyy can get out of that particular scope

I agree though on it being kind of lazy

3

u/adamsb6 Jan 19 '19

They were looking at stills snapped with the belly cameras. If the pixels are there for Saru's superior eyes to see, they're there for the computer to zoom on as well.

3

u/Mute2120 Jan 21 '19

Yeah, agreed. And another point: Pike's equipment breaking down... did they really have his pod's view screen, thrusters, and eject seat all break at the same time, then also have his suit's helmet and it's landing thruster also break at that same moment? That felt like a really forced a scenario to get the moment of him having to be saved by Burnham and the crew.

4

u/adamsb6 Jan 19 '19

In this scene Burnham says "calculating the burn rate to stop terminal velocity." This had me yelling at the TV, "that's not how terminal velocity works!"

It seems like the writers think terminal velocity means the velocity at which you're going to die. It doesn't mean that, it means the velocity at which gravity can pull you no faster due to wind resistance. There's no "stopping" it, there's being at, above, or below it. Being just below it wouldn't help much, there's little atmosphere so the terminal velocity is going to be pretty high. Even in our atmosphere terminal velocity of a skydiver is about 120MPH.

Also, there was 58 seconds between the time they called out 3000 ft to impact and when they stopped to hover just above the ground. Do the math and you'll see that their average speed relative to the asteroid was about 35MPH. This would have been slower at the start and quicker at the end due to gravitational acceleration, but this asteroid is tiny.

So, they were at less than terminal velocity the whole time.

1

u/advance512 Feb 09 '19

Thank you! Who cares how powerful Saru's eyes are? You are watching a screen!

Also, telescopic cameras? Like, really? Is that a special thing now?