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Star Trek and Discovery and dippiness, non-spoilery
I feel ridiculous just typing these words because Star Trek has always been philosophically pretty dippy, but like... Discovery seems to be going dippier?
Like, previous Star Treks were very earnest and occasionally it would indulge in stopping on a peak for a Bruckheimer shot with some dramatic lighting and quote some literature (that they would stop to tell us was super old and how it's so weird that they still know about it).
But this new show has not only replaced the log entry soundclips with voiceovers that typically skip straight to overly-emotive, like, poetry and suddenly talking about the human condition or whatever in a voice throbbing with passion and it's like... oh, so this character is ALSO one of those dramatic people from parties that I always meet and am like "That's right, people like this don't only exist in books; why are they so exhausting, and how can they live like this?"
Right, pardon. Not only that, but they also keep just falling into Meaningful Emotional Conversations that make me remember all the jokes & anecdotes my Philosophy for Social Science majors lecturer told us about what it was like to teach Philosophy for Psychology majors.
Don't get me wrong, there were always plenty of characters in each show who would earnestly have written and/or declaimed the kinds of speeches that keep grabbing my attention in Discovery, but the space devoted to that tended to be limited to comfortable-for-me levels, and I usually didn't have time to do more than a brief chuckle at the cheesiness or a couple of sentences of saying "Hey, that metaphor doesn't work at all..." back to the TV before the Captain's Log or whatever would fade out and the action would start.
These voiceovers are going all in on the poetry, landing just shy of Madeline Bassett levels, and sometimes the rest of the stuff going on (like the plot and the dialogue and stuff!) comes across strongly enough to let me tune it out, but other times it goes on for long enough for me to mentally start keeping that habitually scathing list of all the dippy fallacies committed which has become automatic after a childhood in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (and in the car with my cynical parents on the way home taking turns saying "Oh PLEASE"). If she's feeling uncharitable, my wife might tell you that this list isn't entirely mental. I have a low tolerance for voiceover narration in general, and combined with the dippiness and my no-doubt genetic predisposition to talk back to audio[and/or]visual entertainment... well. She might be considering ways to watch without me soon at this rate.
Like, previous Star Treks were very earnest and occasionally it would indulge in stopping on a peak for a Bruckheimer shot with some dramatic lighting and quote some literature (that they would stop to tell us was super old and how it's so weird that they still know about it).
But this new show has not only replaced the log entry soundclips with voiceovers that typically skip straight to overly-emotive, like, poetry and suddenly talking about the human condition or whatever in a voice throbbing with passion and it's like... oh, so this character is ALSO one of those dramatic people from parties that I always meet and am like "That's right, people like this don't only exist in books; why are they so exhausting, and how can they live like this?"
Right, pardon. Not only that, but they also keep just falling into Meaningful Emotional Conversations that make me remember all the jokes & anecdotes my Philosophy for Social Science majors lecturer told us about what it was like to teach Philosophy for Psychology majors.
Don't get me wrong, there were always plenty of characters in each show who would earnestly have written and/or declaimed the kinds of speeches that keep grabbing my attention in Discovery, but the space devoted to that tended to be limited to comfortable-for-me levels, and I usually didn't have time to do more than a brief chuckle at the cheesiness or a couple of sentences of saying "Hey, that metaphor doesn't work at all..." back to the TV before the Captain's Log or whatever would fade out and the action would start.
These voiceovers are going all in on the poetry, landing just shy of Madeline Bassett levels, and sometimes the rest of the stuff going on (like the plot and the dialogue and stuff!) comes across strongly enough to let me tune it out, but other times it goes on for long enough for me to mentally start keeping that habitually scathing list of all the dippy fallacies committed which has become automatic after a childhood in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (and in the car with my cynical parents on the way home taking turns saying "Oh PLEASE"). If she's feeling uncharitable, my wife might tell you that this list isn't entirely mental. I have a low tolerance for voiceover narration in general, and combined with the dippiness and my no-doubt genetic predisposition to talk back to audio[and/or]visual entertainment... well. She might be considering ways to watch without me soon at this rate.
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