williams_482
This is a major milestone guys. Our first troll!
This is terrible, horrible, and awful, so naturally it’s a perfect fit.
Welcome aboard, it seems you’ll do fine here.
I guess that could work if the holosuites either project a simulation of people/foreign objects once they get farther away in the simulation than in reality. Or, if it can do some really clever lensing magic with force fields to make the real world people and objects seem closer or further? That’s plausible, and maximizes the “reality” of what people are seeing.
I was pretty surprised to learn that the Bashir augment backstory was an off the cuff idea and Alexander Sidig wasn’t informed of it ahead of the episode. It seemed like it fit right in with what we had seen from Bashir already, especially the utterly bizarre tour of his brain which we got in S3E18 Distant Voices. Conversations with the alien entity digging around in there make clear that many of Bashir’s self proclaimed failures were a result of him intentionally tanking, but for the infamous pre-ganglionic nerve vs post-ganglionic fiber final exam mixup, it’s not obvious why Bashir did it. Clearly the writers had something in the works there.
This is a marked distinction from changeling!Bashir being unrevealed to the actor until the episode where his status became relevant. The episode about the baby changeling especially gets very weird with that context, and it feels like the writers hadn’t planned things out quite as well as they usually did with that sequence.
Picard’s finale ran nearly two months ago. As noted in the sidebar we have yet to formalize an official spoiler policy, but it definitely won’t protect people from anything that’s been out that long.
Bottom line, if someone is sensitive to spoilers and behind on watching the latest show, they should probably avoid reading posts that dig deep on Star Trek lore until they have caught up.
A friend of mine also speculates that the new shows have an even harder time with character development than older shows, because they have far fewer episodes per season. When you have 10-15 episodes (instead of say, 26), and you limit character development to snippets in the middle of action, well, then you get Star Trek: Discovery’s tendency to annoy long-time fans.
This is one of the areas where Season 1 nailed it, and the subsequent writers/showrunners couldn’t seem to figure out how to replicate the formula. The first season gave significant time to heavy, emotional moments where characters talked about their feelings, but they were either outside of high pressure, time sensitive situations (like Tyler telling Burnham about what L’Rell did to him), or they are fundamentally a part of those high pressure time sensitive situations and the emotional issues becomes an additional hurdle to clear (like earlier in the same episode when Tyler has a massive PTSD episode upon seeing L’Rell aboard the Ship of the Dead). Both scenes are well done, powerful moments.
This is a stark contrast from, for example, the conversation between Spock and Burnham at the end of the S2 finale. Both characters are awake, alert, sober, stable, and well aware that there is a vitally important time sensitive task which must be done quickly; every moment of delay means more people die in the battle raging around them, and a greater chance of the plan being disrupted by something. And yet, Spock and Burnham take a minute for a tearful goodbye before actually doing what they were supposed to. That’s annoying to the audience and wildly irresponsible for the characters. Both run counter to the emotions the writers are trying to evoke, and neither would have been an issue if this conversation had been worked into an earlier part of the episode.