Love this fact. A major plot point revolving around characters knowing the spectrum of color an element produces when burned feels very old school Trek, quiet competence grounded in science.
Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.
Honestly, I’ll defend the ideas underpinning the spore drive all day. Mycelial networks are deeply weird IRL, and the idea of “what if there was one that grows through subspace” is an interesting extrapolation from that. “Physics as biology” is a pretty fresh and interesting idea for the franchise to explore (and I’m totally here for the argument that they didn’t explore it enough).
Totally fair. I honestly didn’t like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship “in range” on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.
Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they’d destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway…
Yeah, it was doomed to be restricted to one ship from day one, with arguably increasingly contrived excuses as time passed (down to exterminating poor Book’s entire species!).
Makes me wish there were more episodes exploring the biosphere of subspace. We got the Tardigrade but I’m a sucker for world building episodes.
It’s a damn shame we never got to see the JahSepp again.
Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.
100% fair not to like it, but I’ve got to say nonsense science and goofy premises are also very old school Trek. Consider Where No One Has Gone Before’s emotion drive, and its follow up episodes with warp bubble fantasy worlds and Wesley pausing time like some kinda child god.
I agree, and am not a big fan of Wesley being warp Mozart either, but I think the core difference between those and Discovery is that they were one offs. Plenty of single episodes can be shrugged off (*ahem* Threshold) but in Discovery the spore drive was in every episode, and The Burn was a persistent feature of the future timeline. The show spent seasons dealing with these things.
Yeah, fair, if you don’t care for those instances of old Trek, you’re not going to like when new Trek embraces similar stuff. I actually like all the episodes I listed (also a fan of the novel The Wounded Sky, which the first one was based on), but that’s just me.
