DaveSumm

9 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Do you guys feel that George Lucas’s ST story treatments would’ve given us a better trilogy than the Disney ST?

With him writing? Or directing? Fuck no. Let’s not forget that the whole reason Abrams was hired was because they wanted a safe pair of hands to get things back on track as the prequels were, quite famously at this point, utter utter dogshit.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t all this have been better if they’d never called it Episode 7? All it really was was a gimmick to get people excited. The sequels are a fresh trilogy in the same universe, and whenever they feel obligated to actually act as sequels to Episodes 1-6, they’re all the poorer for it.

56 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm still not opposed to the idea in the sequel trilogy, but still, the execution was poor and could have been done better regardless.  Why does the idea appeal? I think it feels very pulpy to have the big bad return when you think he was done for, and thematically I like the idea of the evil of the Sith being something that can't be dealt with as easily as just tossing someone down a reactor shaft. 

I maintain that there was simply nothing left on the table for JJ to do with Ep 9 that would tie it together as an actual saga, other than bringing Palpatine back. Regardless of where you land on Last Jedi, for me its worst crime is that it forgot to be part of the saga, it wanted to be its own movie and not a sequel to either TFA or anything that came before it.

Genuine question to those who hated Palps coming back; what would you have done with Ep 9 that would’ve been a fitting conclusion to the 8 films before it?

15 minutes ago, Ran said:

Lucas had this to say (from The Making of Revenge of the Sith):

Lucas himself says he can’t be redeemed, I’m not sure Anakin deserved a force ghost. Or maybe if his ghost had been off separate from Yoda and Obi Wan, back in the trees somewhere, looking on but not accepted back into the fold, it might’ve been more poignant.

Wait Season 2 has started? I haven’t seen a single piece of marketing for it … huh. 

Let’s not forget this is a man who reveres the prequels, the granddaddy of all the static, monotone, wooden deliveries.

My headcanon was always that lightsabers would be a useless weapon in the hands of anyone other than Jedi, because blasters are a thing. Like bringing a sword to a gunfight, unless you can get to close quarters then you’ve lost. But Jedi have the reflexes / precognition to deflect blaster fire, so it works for them.

Which gets me thinking if anyone ever made a shield out of lightsaber energy…? That just sat around you deflecting the fire for you. I know those little drone things had shields in Phantom Menace, but I assume that wasn’t as good as lightsaber energy.

So Sabine is an 18, Anakin was a 458 in AotC, but then his powers doubled so he was 916 in RotS.

Carry on.

Midichlorians are indeed a thing, but do we have a scale? Or any numbers attached to it at all? I don’t see why one disproves the other, Sabine could have a count of 18 and Anakin 902. The basic theory still works.

(But also midichlorians are fucking stupid, the way Yoda talks about the force in Empire is pretty much the last thing I wanted to have an XP system attached to it.)

2 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I thought we stopped after the prequels! 

The what?

14 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

I hate to keep bringing up a dead horse but how can you guys love Andor and complain about Ahsoka’s pace ? Andor moved at the rate of watching paint dry. Compared to that this show is a lot faster with more things happening. 

Andor is a study of fascism, and the characters who are drawn to it and those that are drawn to rebel against it, and why. It earns its slow pace, as its quieter character moments are important in that telling.

Ahsoka is a follow up to a cartoon, and so far isn’t really about anything as such. A slow pace isn’t inherently better than a fast one, if that’s not the story you’re telling. In as much as Disney tend to homogenise everything previously successful and repackage it anew, I think Ahsoka is so far worse off for the influence Andor has had on it. It’s slow for no other real reason than to (attempt to) give off Andor vibes.

3 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

I am so very tired of the puzzle thing though, especially puzzles that can be worked out by a 9 year old. I mean, come on, the sphere had 3 choices of variables and 6 options - you can't just brute force this? This is what you needed Sabine for? That was lame. 

Yea this was awful. At the very least you could’ve had her say “wait, pull up a model of the temple” and then solve it straight away. But to be staring at the damn temple and the sphere for what was supposed to be a long time, only to go “wait, is it … the same…?” It was literally ‘make object 1 look like object 2’.

I haven’t seen episode 2 yet but surely, SURELY this has to be a map to a location that has some ancient reason to need a map? Not cos Thrawn’s there? He couldn’t possibly have repeated the “ancient” knife map to a wreckage that’s a few decades old could he?

6 minutes ago, fionwe1987 said:

Interesting episode. Chapel being the sole survivor on the Cayuga, or the sole survivor who happened to wake up in time, really really stretched belief for me. They could have done this part better.

It was worse than that, as far as I could tell there was no check at all whether anyone else had survived. Everyone was over the moon that our protagonist’s love interests were OK, never mind the ship that blew up. 

It was a cool episode, yea a bit generic and I’m not a fan of cliff hangers either. Or at least ones like this, Pike will either retreat or come up with some plan to save everyone and I don’t see why we need to wait for that decision. It would’ve been better to end with the decision (much like it was better to end on Riker firing on Picard, not wondering what he’ll decide). I might be forgetting some, but I think the opener and closer might actually be my least favourite episodes of the season?

I still hold that this otherwise excellent series gains nothing from being a prequel. I’m not enjoying it anymore knowing that Chapel will end up marrying some other guy and going from being a badass to handing McCoy his tools. I don’t see the value in poking at the continuity like this when the bridge between TOS and SNW is so large, I can’t imagine gaining anything for watching chronologically. How well do we get to  know Sam Kirk, just so Shatner can unceremoniously flip his corpse over? Or M’Benga, so he can get demoted? 

I was kinda hoping it might have 4 leads… just me maybe.

45 minutes ago, James Arryn said:

Beg your indulgence in my asking this here:

Coming to the UK shortly for some hiking, sincere ask for help here: of the following coasts, which ones are more likely to be not-smelling-of-raw-sewage:

*Sw coast, north side (ie northern coasts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset

*SW coast, south side (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset)

S coast, ie Jurassic to ~ plymouth

Norfolk/Suffolk coast

Se Ireland coast (ie Wicklow down to cork)

Welsh coast, any

Norhumberland coast, say Newcastle to Bamburgh area.

I should note that my preferences were very much for Scottish highlands, Isles, Northern Ireland/Causeway trail, or possibly Yorkshire/Cumbria but have been warned midges are trips killers in this season, esp. for hikers, but if any of you have local knowledge of areas that aren’t experiencing major midge issues amongst these options, please I beg let me know.

If the smell of shit is your concern, I would recommend probably anywhere…? I’ve done a bunch of walks around the south coast, Devon, Cornwall, not to dredge up the whole issue again but it’d be a huge exaggeration to say that we’re all avoiding the coast over here due to the smell. I’ve literally never smelt shit by the sea. Midges … eh, there’s some around but again I’ve never known the quantity of them to ruin any walk. 

My memory was that Wanda saw the kids in another reality, and was obviously grieving for Vision, and went nuts trying to steal that life. I don’t remember Doctor Strange 2 ever actually spelling out that she had had a life with the kids already, but I’ve only seen it once. 

Kang might be legitimately more complicated if you’d seen Loki? It makes perfect sense by itself, he gets banished to the quantum realm, that’s basically it. You don’t need to know that there was once a version of reality where there was only one Kang. I assumed Loki would play into it more tbh. 

Super late to the party but yea, Secret Invasion was incredibly disappointing. Barely anything in it actually landed as intended. I already brought this up, but it really is central to the entire premise; why the fuck is a space faring species tasking a non-space faring man with finding them a planet? What could he possibly be doing up on that station that they aren’t capable of doing themselves? How did he fail them exactly?

And it completely destroys what they were trying to do with his marriage, the twist that he’s married doesn’t work at all if he just left her for however long to do (*insert plot*) on the space station, then she maybe joins the other side to kill him…? Then he nearly just fucks off again at the end anyway? That’s not a marriage, so it’s not a twist.

When they first started the D+ series I know there was a lot of concern that there’d be too much homework involved in seeing the movies now, but they seemed to construct them in such a way that that wasn’t the case. WandaVision was skippable, you could just assume she had the same motivations from Endgame. Falcon & Winter Soldier basically ended with him accepting the mantle of Cap, which again, we’d all assumed he already did in Endgame. Loki generically painted Kang as a threat, but it wasn’t the same one in Quantumania.

I wonder if that’s not working against them a bit though? Secret Invasion just couldn’t drastically change the status of the MCU to the point where you couldn’t assume the Skrulls had the same motivations from Captain Marvel. So it just wasn’t about anything, the Skrulls started out unhappy they didn’t have a planet. And that’s where we leave them too.

I think I kinda loved that. The only bit that broke me was the Klingon section, I was so prepared for them to just join in a line of the song they were already singing, but going full hip-hop was just a shade too ridiculous for me. 

But damn, La’an’s solo song (flying blind) would happily sit alongside any Disney offering. Better than most, in fact. Between that and her confession to Kirk, which could’ve been quite clumsy if handled badly, Chong knocked it out of the park. 

”From hells heart, I stab at th..”

”Oh FYI Khan, funny story … that guy you met earlier, my son? If not for him, I’d have totally fucked your great great granddaughter. In fact in an alternate reality, I did!”

51 minutes ago, horangi said:

I am genuinely curious Spocky, is the measuring up of an opposition leader a British thing or a Spocky thing? 

Measuring up: British thing. Raging hate boner for Starmer specifically: Spocky thing. 

New thread, in which I won’t get burned by a good looking trailer for a project that turns out to be shit.

Looks cool, can’t wait!

Yea the UK editions I’ve seen, even the hardbacks are split in two for each book. There is a single volume for Way of Kings available but the publisher didn’t commit to whether they’d do the whole series. I normally don’t like split editions but Oathbringer particularly is a stupidly massive book, it does make more sense. Plus Gollancz have done an awesome job keeping the Cosmere stuff consistent, I have an entire shelf of them and they look great.

53 minutes ago, Ran said:

I mean, they say there'll be an inquiry, I doubt there'll be anything minor about it (but they probably won't show it).

Dak'rah was apparently skilled in the hand-to-hand combat, and his Klingon rage was getting the better of him. Even a skilled martial artist can only do so much when a knife is involved and someone is being aggressive.

It just felt a bit weird that it was implied it wasn’t a murder investigation, when he was stabbed by someone with a huge motive to do so. It might’ve worked better if he’d fallen from some height and we didn’t know if he was pushed or something, to give a bit more reasonable doubt as to what happened. 

I mostly enjoyed this episode, although I can see why people take issue with it. There was more than a few things that took me out of the episode and didn’t make sense; why would Starfleet specifically order crew to interact with someone they had every reason to hate? How has he negotiated any kind of peace if he killed his own men then defected? How is there only a minor investigation if someone we’ve been repeatedly told is super important gets stabbed? Shouldn’t M’Benga, as about the most qualified person in the whole of Star Trek to be both compassionate and capable of defending himself, have been able to subdue him non-lethally even if he did start the fight? And I could have used some rough geography to what was actually happening on the planet, wounded were beamed in and there were background phasers, and M’Benga somehow could walk straight into the enemy leaders lair and wipe out his men.

The performances were all great, and I like what they were going for. A blend of Duet, AR-558 and The Most Toys (the did he / didn’t he part I mean), but didn’t really land as successfully as the first two at least. But I’m always pro-Star Trek attempting morally ambiguous episodes.

I guess I’m in the minority, but I didn’t love this one. But that’s kinda on me, it was as good a crossover between these two shows you could ask for. I just love the competence porn, and I’ve compartmentalised Lower Decks in my head to account for that. I enjoy it but I don’t take it seriously as an actual depiction of Starfleet. So this felt like a clash for me, and basically every scene involved someone being grossly unprofessional when it comes to temporal protocol. Mostly Boimler and Mariner obviously, but none of the crew of the Enterprise helped at all. Pike just gave up trying to manage the situation, Boimler was provoked to tell them more, and Spock outright asked him about his future. It all felt strange when two episodes ago, this exact problem nearly destroyed the Federation.

The rest was quite neat, it was a nice touch to have the Orion pirate thing come full circle. But didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous two.

13 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Sure, that's fair. 

So, what is it in that trailer that makes it 'fun?' I'm now interested to know what people are seeing there. Is it the premise? The plot? The characters? The action? 

To me it doesn't tick any of those boxes, so its baffling to me that it would for other people, unless they were incredibly undemanding and any movie containing lasers is enough to get them to go watch it.

My assumption is that the trailer shows them struggling with swapping places every time, but the climax will feature them working seamlessly together and using it to their advantage, so each enemy gets a coordinated attack from all three; a punch from Captain Marvel, some phasing thing from Monica and a fake light thingy from Ms Marvel, all in quick succession. Kinda like how Dr Strange kept portalling everyone in Infinity War to attack Thanos. Which sounds like a cool concept, and if well directed it could make for some good action sequences.

I’m not sure that the trailer really gives away much, we already knew the above from the ending of Ms Marvel and other than that, seems like your basic ‘there’s a bad guy, we need to stop her’. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I’m fairly agnostic on Cap, enjoyed Ms Marvel, not that enthused by Monica but we’ll see.

Of course the trailer for Secret Invasion looked great, and that’s proving pretty weak. I just don’t think we can judge nearly as much from a trailer as some like to.

It’s having a great run, this show. They’re really threading the needle with classic Trek plots, but good character exploration on the way. One complaint here is that it was SUCH a classic Trek setup, that the first thing I thought was ‘is this aliens trying to communicate’ and it took a long time to actually get there. Then once they did, they seemed to sacrifice the technobabble for a moment of trust between Pike and Uhura, which is fair enough. But really all she was going on was the ‘burnt out receiver’ having a nice ring to it, and her contorting these visions into some meaning. She really wasn’t “certain” at all. I would rather have seen Kirk and Uhura puzzle out from what they knew, that organic substance X would be present if they were correct, quick scan, cool, blow up the station. 

Maybe I’m reading too much into it but did anyone think the conversation between Kirk and his brother went out of its way to establish this was the Prime timeline? “Our father WHO IS TOTALLY ALIVE STILL…”