Star Trek: Discovery -- General Discussion

because the last scene of episode 9 scared me too much so i needed a few hours in advance to deal with this, so no regrets. Only spoiled on that though. How did i know? I could just...sense it.

Wilson Cruz has also said that his favorite scene to film has not aired yet, so there's hope. Especially with the producers openly talking about how they're aware of Bury Your Gays as a trope, referencing it by name. So yeah, I'm not calling this the end.

I'd also point out that whatever else, one) it happened in Sickbay, which is historically rarely empty for long, so if there's any place permanent death can be defied, he's literally right there, and two) Trek has been known to undo deaths on multiple occasions - they've blown up the title ships and even characters only to undo it not long after.

. Does anyone think the evil discovery is going to attack someone and cause the good discovery to be wanted when they get back?

They killed off the gay guy  (in the first gay m/m couple ever on the shows) in season one, fuck you Star Trek! If they don't fix it, it is bury your gay no matter how much hand waving they do.

There certainly could be some wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey space boyfriend powers at play, but also he was "killed" in sick bay, where there is amazing federation medical tech which one would assume can fix a damaged spinal chord, and, as was established earlier in the episode, other doctors. Ash transported off the ship very shortly afterwards, and we don't know yet what happened when the body was discovered.

The trailer itself implies something in it - Stamets is shown out of the force field he was left behind last we saw him, cradling Culber in what is clearly not-Sickbay (I think it's the spore drive room). Which... I mean, I find it really hard to believe that a barely cognizant of the world around him Stamets could bust out of the force field and drag his dead lover to some other part of the ship. So that's something.

Honestly, though? If this WEREN'T Star Trek, which is literally my first fandom, a fandom I have been a part of my entire life, I would probably walk away because of this. I am offering trust both because of a lifetime of loyalty and reading interviews that involve talking about Culber's story continuing, so there is likely something up their sleeves - Star Trek has not been above resurrection before, Spock is only the most famous example.

BUT. While the writers might understand the hazards of Bury Your Gays, maybe are planning to undo it, the fact of the matter is still that within episodes of introducing the first gay male relationship on TV Trek (and the first queer relationship in Trek that has lasted more than a single episode or movie), there is an act of violence performed on one of them that leaves the viewer with the impression that they are stone dead. That AT THIS POINT IN TIME, queer representation on Star Trek Discovery has just been brutally halved. Not to mention the element of how, of the four deaths that I would call major on the show - those four being Captain Georgiou, Commander Landry, Doctor Culber, and Ensign Connor - three have been of people of color.

If this show did not have the Star Trek name attached to it, I would have dropped it because of this, or at least made it far less of a priority than I have. So they really need to be fixing things, and doing so SPECIFICALLY in a way that does not include more death. Killing off characters no longer has the weight it once did, because they're abusing this 'anyone can die' attitude - if anyone actually CAN die, what's the point of getting attached to anyone, if they might die at any point, not as the culmination of a character arc, but purely for shock value?

As he was saying, for the moment they've just completely halved queer representation in Star Trek, and we're not even at the end of season one. Not cool.