People are
complaining about what the Discovery looks like; it's based on the infamous rejected Ralph McQuarrie Enterprise concept design from the unproduced movie Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. (I'm not linking a picture of the "McQuarrieprise" here because, seriously, that thing is Monday Morning Ugly.)
The irony is I love the Discovery design while hating the McQuarrie Enterprise. (It's not the Defiant, the Sovereign, the NX, the Odyssey, or the Kelvin Timeline Constitution, but I'll take it.)
Anyway. Lots of Star Trek chat to follow immediately below.
WHAT SNORB BOUGHT AT THE LOCAL COSTCO A COUPLE MONTHS AGOOriginal crews. Original villains. Original heroes. Original worlds.
Fifty dollars, and this is the remastered version of each Original Series episode. That means the physical model Enterprise is replaced with a better-looking CGI one, the music was rerecorded, and there's no more re-use of the same "Enterprise orbits a planet that looks oddly like Earth" stock shot! (Granted, Spock's Brain is still on Season Three Disc 1...)
WHAT SNORB BOUGHT LITERALLY THE DAY AFTER POSTING THISThis was forty bucks at a nearby estate sale. (They also had TNG and Voyager, but BBC America practically has a Star Trek: The Next Generation marathon every day that's not Wednesday, and I'm not going to pay $$$ for Voyager. Too bad this guy didn't have Enterprise...) This picture was taken, for reference, on the passenger seat of my (thankfully air-conditioned) car in the middle of a New Jersey summer with a pen and my MP3 player for size reference. The things I go through for Best Trek.
SNORB PLAYS STAR TREK ONLINE: AGENTS OF YESTERDAYThis is the Pioneer class utility cruiser, your starter ship if you are a TOS Federation character in Star Trek Online:
There are other ships available that were clearly inspired by the Original Series (the Daedalus class science vessel, Perseus class escort, Gemini class cruiser, Ranger class battlecruiser, and, of course, the one the only the Constitution class command cruiser... plus a bunch of bowling-shoe-ugly 29th century temporal vessels. I'm looking at YOU, Sagittarius class...) but the Pioneer is a fine vessel for boldly going in the year 2270.
Playing the new missions introduced in Agents of Yesterday is very much like an interactive TOS episode, right down to the film grain filter over the gameplay. You get to meet the Enterprise crew-- Walter Koenig recorded new lines as
Captain Pavel Chekov, and you can talk to each TOS crewmember (save Kirk; they couldn't afford Shatner's likeness or voice.) Each mission is a callback to a classic episode (to the point where the
actual dialogue from a certain scene in Journey to Babel was recycled, so we get to hear Mark Lenard as Sarek once more!)
Oh, and that final mission objective in "The Battle of Caleb II." Five minutes of just
what it means to be in the captain's chair.
The objective is Good Luck and Godspeed. Your character heroically volunteers to stay behind and face certain death fighting an armada of Klingons so the rest of the fleet can get out of Dodge; Commander Kor even praises you for this, saying "At least ONE Starfleet captain knows the meaning of honor!" before you fight his flagship and escorts. Your objective is to survive five minutes of infinitely-respawning Klingon battlecruisers. You are not expected to survive.Only complaint is that, when customizing your uniform, any rank braid above the rank of Lieutenant Commander does not display on your uniform's sleeves.
(This is because your first objective after being brought forward in time to 2410 is to get an Odyssey uniform so your character can blend in.)SNORB SAW STAR TREK BEYONDStar Trek Beyond was awesome. Best of the three Kelvin Timeline movies. Saucer section of the Enterprise was weaponized most gloriously by Kirk and Chekov. Scotty had some nice interaction with Jaylah. Spock, of all people, had the single funniest line in the movie. The destruction of the Enterprise didn't really touch me as much as it did in The Search For Spock or Generations, but at least it fought back this time (cough Into Darkness)
Leonard Nimoy's death was written into the movie; two Vulcans approach Spock and tell him that Spock Prime died off-screen. Among his possessions that we see at the end of the movie is
a photo of the Original Series crew, which was a repurposed Star Trek V publicity photo, so we get to see the full TOS crew one last time.And yes, the movie was indeed "in loving memory of LEONARD NIMOY" and "For ANTON."
STAR TREK: DISCOVERY: WHAT WE NOW KNOWAccording to Bryan Fuller, Star Trek: Discovery is set in the 2250s, ten years before Star Trek: The Original Series.
The main character is a human female, but
not the Discovery's captain ("We've had six series from the captain's POV.")
Broadcast Standards and Practices has no bearing on Discovery (the main draw of making the show for CBS All Access.)
Season One is 13 episodes. There is an overall story arc, and each episode has a standalone story.
The crew will have more aliens than the other series.
There will be a gay character.
The show's background event is not the Romulan War, the Battle of Axanar, the loss of the Kobayashi Maru, or the dealings of Section 31 (Starfleet's clandestine black ops division.)
The official abbreviation for the show is "DSC."