Starfleet Academy series

I'm going to take issue with this, because it really depends upon how one crafts the story. After all, Nightcrawler can teleport, and nobody complains that this ruins stories in X-Men.

As for the reprogrammable matter, again, that hinges upon how you do the story. For example, say the USS Wizardprize is facing a frontal attack from the dastardly Greebles. With reprogrammable matter, they can quickly reinforce the forward hull of the ship by pulling material from the rest of the ship, until those areas are "wafer-thin." Not only does this mean you can have a longer frontal battle than you might otherwise would, but things suddenly get a lot more interesting if a second Greeble ship appears to the rear of the Wizardprize.

Or, consider a ship in a Voyager-type situation, you can easily cannibalize matter from one part of the ship to repair another, but eventually, you're going to start running low on matter, and if reprogrammable matter is something that can only be created by a machine as large as a starbase...

for me it's not the time setting per se but all the magical stuff they did to prove how high tech it was. Personal transporters with no obvious means to direct them, magic matter you "program" with your mind like a superpower, nacelles disconnected for no reason other than cool visuals.

This from a show that already tried to wow us with infinite null space inside the ships hull BEFORE the jump.

I thought the whole "someone has to put the Federation back together" opportunity was interesting though, so I watched... and they never did that.

nothing official.

My similar question is this: why does a freshly programmed holographic officer NEED to go to the academy at all? Can't you just program in everything you want them to know?

Rewatch the first 15 seconds of the clip. She walks over with her glasses in her hand, puts them on, and then takes them off and hands them to one of the space whales. Is the space whale's job to hold on to the captain's glasses? Why does the captain need glasses in the 32nd century? Why are there still space whales in the 32nd century? Is it foreshadowing for how poor this series will be?

Yes, all that.

Well, same question with Data really. However, Starfleet may be interested in getting them socialised? The Doctor was extremely abrasive in the early days and it was only formative experiences outside his comfort zone of medical training that shaped him into a true crewmember.

Also, haven't watched the clip but is it stated the hologram is freshly programmed to serve in Starfleet, or just freshly programmed? I had an RPG idea for a holo-officer who was programmed to develop its matrix more naturally by learning and decided to join Starfleet for the challenge.

It will be a dude, expessing an "alternate gender identity," and they'll spend at least half the fucking season developing it.

Still butthurt about the 22 seconds it took for Adira Tal to come out, for Stamats to say "okay," and for everybody to just accept Adira's prefrence and move on with their lives?

Sounds less tiring than the forty fucking seasons we've had of your "alternate humanity" bullshit.

I was actually thinking of The Orville, but STD also did its part to drive that into the ground.

It must be so painful for you to see the existence of anyone who's different from you reflected in media. My heart bleeds.

That's certainly a fair point, but it just doesn't work for me. Reprogrammable matter might as well be magic incantations with how it works. Star Trek certainly has a history of treating technology and biology like magic, but the reprogrammable matter and the instant site to site transporter just take away from the verisimilitude of the environment for me, primarily, I think, because it's all CGI and in the back of my mind I know they're all just standing in a room waving their hands around like something's happening. There's this disconnect for me. Good CGI should make me not realize I'm looking at something fake on the screen. It's the same reason why I don't care for the Transformers movies. I'm fully aware I'm watching something with exactly zero stakes when it comes to physicality.

Also, again the 32nd century strikes at the heart of it for me. You mean to tell me in the 800 years since Picard's era, they're still dealing with shields dropping by percentage points? I kind of get where Roger Ebert was coming from all of those years ago when he was criticizing, at the time, the latest Star Trek movie, which seemed to be just repeating the same plot points over and over again without trying anything new.

It just feels like a retread. In this case, a 1,100 years in the future retread.

Which makes me think, the Excalbians should be part of the Federation at this point.

Star Trek in the 32nd Century, for some reason:

Heaven fucking forbid there be any brief escapist reprieve from "CURRENT THING."

Yes, because people different than you simply existing is something you need to escape from.

Existing, or derailing an entire episode for some fucking after-school special skit scolding me to toe the line?

If your brain didn't escape out to the insert bullshit switch, it would blow a fucking fuse, wouldn't it?
You'd die. You'd physically die.

UA will die of an aneurysm when he finally realizes a whole bunch of children in his neighborhood were able to eat without paying for it.

Okay, every time UA pulls (insert bullshit) I'm gonna replace it with "you want my Lucky Charms".
That's just gonna happen now.
I don't wanna hear any weak-willed babies being all "you're ruining the board, Dicky!! ".

Ruining the board, hell. The only people ruining the board are the people who can't help but show up and shit on others for existing and then getting angry when called on it. They treat Wordforge like it's their own personal dumping ground, as if we like having shit dumped on us and consider it an honor. Nah, it's always good to challenge that when they say something grossly wrong. That said, it's better when everyone just ignores them, but that's unlikely to happen because if I've learned anything on this board, it's that most people love to argue.

Oh, and for the record, regarding Academy, I love Giamatti, Hunter, and Picardo. My concerns have nothing to do with them. I also love the idea of a Jem'Hadar who is a woman. Something definitely had to happen in that 800 years, and I'm curious how she came to be there.

No episode was ever derailed except in your deranged, obsessive mind.

If one wanted (I don't, really) one could argue (particularly for the Jem Hadar) that those two are members of a race for which being that thick is, in fact, the normal healthy weight. Maybe a side effect of making female Jem Hadar is thickness being normal.

Imagine having a time machine, and you pop back to visit someone during the Crusades. WTF are they going to make of you pulling out a frozen burrito, microwaving it, and eating it? You want to talk about mind-blowing magic, as far as Richard the Lionhearted (or Saladin, or other poor bastard who had to live before things like vaccines and antibiotics), you've just done it, even though everything but time travel in that example, is something millions, if not billions of people do every day in the world, without ever thinking about it.

See, this is where being a serious geek is both a help and a hindrance. Reprogrammable matter is actually a thing that we're working on (and have been for some time). Now, sure, it's not exactly like what we see in Disco, because they're presently trying to figure out how to use things like atoms as a computer chip (I'm a bit oversimplifying here, but not too much), but the ultimate goal is basically something like what we see in Disco.

As for the site-to-site transporter, some physicist type ran the numbers for the ordinary transporters we saw in everything up to Nemesis, or whatever was the current post-TOS era Trek at the time. You know how the estimates for warp drive working require, at the low end, converting the whole of Jupiter to energy, and at the high end, take something like the daily output of energy from the sun? Yeah, those transporters would require way more energy than that. Like orders of magnitude more. Then you get into the amount of computer processing power and data storage necessary to accomplish the task. Those are absurdly yuge. Like needing to rewrite the known laws of physics to get the stuff to work the way we've seen it on the shows/movies prior to Disco. If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the restaurant at the End of the Universe?

Now, I do get where you're coming from with the CGI aspects. I'll point out, at least for me, the issue comes down to shit that the director does. I first noticed this when I saw "Serenity." The CGI in that wasn't nearly as good as that used in the Star Wars prequels, but it also wasn't nearly as annoying to me when I saw it. That's because Joss Whedon's a better director than Lucas, and knows how to use it better than Lucas does.

You would prefer them to say, "Shields are down by five gafargables!"?

No argument there, and I was never a fan of the idea of a Starfleet Academy TV series when it was first floated a decade or more ago. @Crosis36 knows way more about things like literary criticism than I ever will, so he can put a better spin on things, but there are times when retreads, even screamingly obvious ones, are praiseworthy. I mean, once you realize that the plots for "The Lion King" and "Black Panther" are little more than retreads of "Hamlet," you can't unsee it, but I've never encountered anyone bitching about that aspects of those films. (IP theft, and how some of the actors were treated, is another matter.) Not saying that they will necessarily pull this off, just that there might be some shit going on we don't know about.

Harlan Ellison had some pretty choice words for what it was like dealing with the fucksticks running Hollywood back in the day, and one can only assume that it has gotten worse in the years since. I can well see the creative folks behind this pointing to the popularity of TWoK amongst Trekkies/Trekkers, and showing the clips from Academy alongside clips from TWoK, to get the suits to buy off on it, when in reality the parallel clips have as much to do with Academy as do the appearances of Chapel and Rand do with the plots of the various movies.

4K upvotes to 27K down votes.
Here's a few comment from YouTube:

To all of that I say, they think the audience is stupid when it's them that are stupid. Like I've said ion the past, they don't know anything about Star Trek other than surface level pop culture bits.

So will the backup copy of the Doctor from Living Witness show up?

They could fix the transporter thing for me if they simply had the officer say "engineering" before they tap the badge and everyone who does so arrives at a designated corner of engineering that the badges are programmed for - and you couldn't use them to pop to a place not in the programming.

It's not that the tech EXISTS it's that it's, either via sloppy writing or deliberately, presented as more magical than scientific (or, like the vast empty space inside Discovery, serves no purpose except cool* visuals). Programable matter in and of itself is FINE - presenting it as telepathically driven like you're casting a spell ala The Scarlet Witch is sloppy.