Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

So, if you have 100 characters speaking Breen, and Moll wouldn’t necessarily know English, what language did you want them to speak? And how would you know what they were saying?

Moll speaks English.

Pretty much another crap episode, this one was a little better than the others. This episode has a bit less filler than the previous ones. But still kind of bad when the two best parts were when Raynar took command and Book "flirting" with oil bath dude.

Having Tilly on the ship saved them, her mass balanced the gravitational pull of the black holes. Discovery was able to use her gravity well to ride out of the accretion disc.

I'm pretty sure I said this a while ago, but Discovery took a sharp wrong turn and got stuck in Shitsville about two or three episodes in to the third season. So much promise with the 32nd century and they flushed it all away with horrible writing and awful stories. Worse, they're going to continue this nonsense with the Starfleet Academy series.

Sad part is, there have been occasional flashes of really good stuff, which is why I keep watching (although I almost stopped after season four). I like Burnham but don't think the writers have done justice to her story arc.

This season hasn't been too bad; it just hasn't been good.

A more serious answer.

Time dilation would depend on the distance from the Swarzchild radius. They weren't on the event horizon, if they were then time would basically stand still.

It looked like they were about twice the distance from the even horizon, at that distance time dilation is about 80%. If they were closer, say 1.5 times the distance time dilation is about 60%. So while there would be time dilation both of the black holes had rather small Schwarzchild radiuses.

I agree with just about everything you said.
Michelle Paradise tanked the show. She made it as much like the stuff she previously worked on as possible. Weepy teen drama bullshit.
Vampire Diary, Exes and Ohs, and people are surprised at how Disco turned out?
Top it off with either sidelining or writing out all their most interesting characters and you have a recipe for blandness

It is metaphorically painful to read the TrekBBS threads on this show. Hey @Crosis36, was that you over there getting called racist for not liking the Burnham character?

We assume Moll speaks English.

you ever read Chaucer? English from 600 years ago is hard enough to read, and practically impossible to recognize when heard.

But absolutely nothing changed on Earth, the Federation, or the entire Milky Way Galaxy between the 25th and 32nd century. Because why would it.

heh-there's that, too.

Why would we expect 24-25th century english to sound any closer to how we speak today than that does to Shakespeare's era(which IIRC is about the time of the "great vowel shift").

Yes, though it wasn't even that I didn't like the Burnham character. I criticized the way she had evolved since season one, or something, and was told I just dint like seeing black women in positions of power. So I told that person to fuck off.
I was also accused of being transphobic because I thought Adira was a wasted opportunity, Gray was fucking pointless, and their relationship was as dull as dushwater

Yeah, Gray was TOS-Uhura (and/or Mayweather) of transness.
BUT! TOS-Uhura planted seeds.
SNW is supposed to get another NB character. Hopefully, they'll get better writing.

TOS-Uhura planted seeds, yes. Gray did not, though. TV has all manner of trans characters on shows like Orange Is The New Black, Sense8, Sabrina, Umbrella Academy, Euphoria, and on and on.
So Gray was hardly a trailblazer. It felt a lot more like a desperate bid for publicity. Gray was around just long enough to get on the cover of Out Magazine or whatever, and then poof, they're gone.

It's too soon to know what seeds Gray may have planted. The fact that Gray wasn't a trailblazing character like Uhura doesn't mean that people who watch Star Trek won't say either "Hey, that Gray is totally normal and likeable. Maybe I don't have to be afraid that real-life trans persons are coming for my pee-pee" or "I feel seen and validated as a trans/nonbinary person. I'm going to pursue a career in the sciences because of my hero Gray." or "Gray makes me believe in a future is coming where people aren't going to bully me for being trans/nonbinary. That's something I can hang onto to get through this rough period in my backwards-ass town/high school."

If you asked people in 1968ish about the impact that Uhura had, most people probably would have said "Who?"

Now I doubt that Gray will likely have a wide impact, because Discovery isn't as impactful as TOS, Gray wasn't as prominent a character or as interesting of one, and the media landscape means that there's five gazillion shows out there. But you never can tell.

Mass literacy/communication/schooling will probably do a lot more to standardize English than was possible back in the 1600s. Yes, there probably should be a lot more 23rd/24th century slang evidenced in English, and imports from other languages. But it doesn't seem unlikely that the core of English now would still almost all be in play in the 2200s and 2300s.

Hey, that's Federation Standard to you, Mister.

RIP STD. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

They have gone back and forth as to whether everyone is speaking English or Federation Standard, or if English is Federation Standard. It looks like the term "Federation Standard" was only used in the post-streaming era.

I am very skeptical that anyone will ever accuse Gray of being a hero character.
Look, all things being equal, yeah, you're right, Gray could have been interesting. But they took anything that might have been interesting about Gray OR Adira and threw it right out the windows.
In contrast, SNW fans are still interested in seeing Captain Angel show up again. I'd wager there are way more people who feel "seen" by Angel than they do Gray.

valid-
although it also beggars the question of if English in any of its many forms would still be Earth, let alone Federation standard. Compared to most this planet has to offer, it's pretty fuckin' clunky. If it survives, I'd expect something like Spanglish with Yoda providing syntax. Most languages take loan words, English robs their house and fucks their dog.

Different characters resonate with different people in different ways, and often times having little to do with the ways in which TPTB intended.

I didn't identify much with Uhura, Geordi, Guinan or Mayweather in particular despite us being Black. And some of that was due to none of those characters getting much in the way of love from the writers. It also has to do with them being superficially Black. By that I mean this: it's an inherent part of Scotty's character that he's Scots. It would not make sense for a Latino character to be talking about my "wee bairns," or calling people "laddie" or "lassie," for example. Picard is canonically French and despite being played by a Brit, occasionally shows his pride in being French, whether it's defending French as the language of civilization, his love of wine, his slipping into the occasional curse word in French, his getting kids to sing Frere Jacques.

for 99 percent of their lines/plots/characterization, the fact of Uhura, Geordi, Guinan and Mayweather being Black has nothing to do with anything. Off the top of my head, there are only a handful of times when it matters that Uhura is of African descent: when fake-Abe Lincoln calls her a "charming Negress" in "The Savage Curtain," when she envisions a hot Black guy talking to her in Swahili in "The Man Trap," and when Sulu says in "The Naked Time" "I'll save you, fair maiden!" and she responds "Sorry, neither!"

I can't remember a single time when it mattered that Geordi or Guinan was Black. The one time it mattered with Mayweather was when an Andorian was calling the Enterprise crew pinkskins, and Mayweather was like, "Excuse me?"

But I'm sure for some audience members, it meant the world that they represented a future where Black people were accepted for who they are.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that there was precious little characterization to Gray other than them being in love with Adira.

Gray wasn't given much to do. But I'd bet there are some viewers super-excited about the acknowledgement of non-binary people at all, as bland as Gray was.

I think "boring" is kind of the strategy.

Watch Culber and Stamets advance the gay agenda by... brushing their teeth together. As their kid, Adira is really just a Gen Z version of Wesley with Gray being the plot device to show him going through a break up.

The blubbering blubfest should begin soon...I mean on the TBBS DSC forum, not the finale. I hear on this episode, the crew is completely focused, competent, and dispassionate.

If the meme pages I follow are any indicator, the transes seem to have adopted Jadzia Dax as their mascot, as the gays have adopted Bashir and Garak.

If nothing else, Adira and Gray have followed in Jadzia's footsteps by being mostly wasted. Maybe in a couple decades they'll be role models too.

I, too, have questioned this as well, and, as a storyteller, I’ve no idea how future generations, in a world in which all war, famine, and all other means of human injustices have been eliminated (according to both Kirk and Picard) what would differentiate a black character from a white character? I mean, sure give them better backstories which lead to better storylines, but the only thing right now that differentiates white from black is mostly in the US and is more about predjudice and politics than culture.

How would you have written storylines for those characters to make them more interesting - as they are in canon?

There are a few ways one could go about it, and to be clear, taking the Uhura/Geordi/Mayweather route is perfectly legit and perhaps the point Maybe 300 years from now race is so outmoded a concept among humans that there's no reason to expect a person of any given ethnicity to behave differently than another.

Another route they could go is have someone act about race the nway Chekhov/Scotty and others act about nationality where a good third of cheir character is repping their nationality. I think there would be a danger of some ugly stereotyping in that case go. I don't know how Russians might feel about Chekhov being such a ridiculously pro-Russian guy. I think if there was a Black character who spoke in what Hollywood deemed a Black accent and had that as one of his main characteristics it would wear out his welcome real quick.

I think a happy middle ground is someone like Sisko. Ir's not just window dressing that he's Black, but it's not the whole reason for his character, either. You could not just plug in an equally talented actor of any ethnicity to play him, because subtle things say he's got sensibilities that are rooted in the African-American experience. Far Beyond The Stars just would not have hit as hard if his character were White. The fact that he didn't want to participate in the Vic Fontaine program because of its historical inaccuracy. His going back in time and becoming Gabriel Bell...while one could imagine a White character doing the same things and reacting in similar ways, IMO Sisko's identity as a Black man added something extra to the mix.

Remember, Nichelle Nichols wanted to quit the show because she felt her character was pointless until MLK convinced her to stay. There's the story about how Uhura inspired Whoopi Goldberg to get into acting, how at a Trek convention she ran into an ex-white supremacist who told her that it was her character in Star Trek that had enabled him to see the error of his ways, and then there's what she did for NASA.


Are you familiar with the film Mississippi Burning? It's about some FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers in the 60s. There's a large amount of criticism of the film because it's centered around the white characters, instead of the people who lost their lives (and were black). And you know what? There absolutely should be a film that is centered around the various black activists who died during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but we don't live in a society where very many white people would go see such a film. I'm sure that I don't have to tell you that the people who most need to see such a film are white. So, if you want to give them an idea of what things were like, and have them show up to the movie, you've got to center it around white people. Oh, and I don't think that I have to tell you that story of civil rights activists being murdered in the 60s is something that people of color know about. It's us white folks who don't know shit about such things.

I'd never heard about Juneteenth until roughly 10 years or so ago. And were it not for the interwebs, I probably never would have heard about it. When my employer got bought out by a larger company 2 years ago and announced that as part of the paid holidays we got off that Juneteenth was one of them, I had to explain to my white coworkers WTF it was. None of them knew about it.

It sucks, but that's how things work. The target demo for Uhura wasn't people of color, it was white people. It showed them that it was possible for people of color to exist in the same society as whites and be their equal (despite the fact that Uhura's job was little more than to be the telephone operator).

So, yeah, Grey might seem to be a generic character, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah, I read some TOS retrospective a while back that suggested it was a conscious decision to make Spock the only character that had to deal with racism in the 23rd century while Uhura and Sulu were right there.

Sisko was a great character and Avery Brooks portrayed the character excellently.

Like the character Red in Shawshank Redemption, a different actor would have totally ruined the character despite Red being a white, Irish guy in the book short story.

I believe the writers wrote those characters to be interchangeable (as in best actor that auditioned). I don’t think those characters were ever supposed to be any more important than what they were. But, like everything else, for every minor minority bit part, there are 8 white actors in equally dull and superficial bit parts.