Today in getting shafted:

In my defense, there was an attempted coup.

Can you believe it's been almost a week since the Star Trek: Discovery season finale and we haven't even talked about it? I feel like I've let you down...anyway, I liked the finale. The entire season in fact, but well, they did it again. Did what you might reasonably ask? They did the thing. The thing that just drives me up the wall and they should know better and at this point I'm beginning to wonder if maybe they're just trolling the fans. 

Now you have that piece
of information. You're welcome.

You might remember awhile back, my complaining about the turbolift on Discovery? Huh? Well I did, and if you're wondering what a turbolift is, you might want to sit down for this, I'm about to nerd you up. So a turbolift is like a futuristic elevator on a starship that goes up and down, but can also move horizontally because ships are big and sometimes you need to get somewhere fast. Turbo-fast, I guess. Anyway, the turbolifts on every other Star Trek show are just shown as moving through a shaft, you know, like an elevator. The special effects people didn't over think it, and I appreciate that.

Yes, obviously there are bigger problems in
the world, but my capacity for anxiety allows me
to worry about more than one thing at a time.

But for some reason, the production team on Discovery likes to show the lifts moving through the interior of the ship which is inexplicably large and full of little craft and robots floating around inside. It's...dumb. And I thought they finally got just how dumb it is, but then the season finale had this big, protracted fight scene on a turbo lift as it flew, flew, through the hull. The hull which now contains a vast city scape. In fact, one of the combatants is knocked from the lift and falls hundreds of feet to his death. It was preposterous.

Oh right, so they can have big
protracted fight scenes on them.

Even more preposterous are these glowing square frame things that materialize in front of the lift as it moves through the ship. I guess they're like a sort of future elevator shaft or a track or something. But it seems like if they can just beam the track ahead of the car wouldn't it just be easier to beam the whole car? Or I don't know, the passengers? A new element added this season is that the communicator badges now have built in transporters, so the crew just just beam anywhere on the ship at will, so why do they even still have the turbolifts? 

And yes, I realize I'm talking about a TV show about people in the future who don't believe in money and have sex with aliens. But in sci-fi it's almost more important to make the setting as believable as possible, and these ludicrous shots just take you right out of it. And now, instead of telling you what I thought of the Discovery season finale--which again, was great--I'm complaining about the goddamn Willy Wonka elevator fight scene.

"Stop. Just stop doing this. It sucks."

-everyone