Today the World Science Fiction Society announced their nominees for the 2018 Hugo Awards, celebrating the best in science fiction and fantasy. And among the nominees was Star Trek: Discovery, nominated in the Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form category for the time-looping episode “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” written by Aron Eli Coleite & Jesse Alexander and directed by David M. Barrett.
Rainn Wilson as Harry Mudd, Jason Isaacs as Captain Gabriel Lorca, Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, Anthony Rapp as Lieutenant Paul Stamets, and Shazad Latif as Lieutenant Ash Tyler in “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”
Discovery will be going up against Black Mirror (“USS Callister”), Doctor Who (“Twice Upon a Time”), The Good Place (“Michael’s Gambit” and “The Trolley Problem”) and This American Life for the song “The Deep” by Clipping.
Discovery will be competing with the Star Trek-themed Black Mirror episode “USS Callister”
Star Trek has received numerous Hugo nominations over the decades. On television, the original Star Trek series had eight nominations with two wins, The Next Generation had three nominations with two wins and both Deep Space Nine and Enterprise had two nominations. Until Discovery, only The Original Series and The Next Generation picked up nominations in their first seasons. Gene Roddenberry and Bjo Trimble were also honored with special awards in 1968. Nine of thirteen Trek feature films have also been nominated, but none have won.
TNG’s series finale “All Good Things” picked up the last Hugo for Star Trek
Winners of the 2018 Hugo Awards will be announced at a ceremony at the World Science Fiction Convention on August 19.
Related: Star Trek: Discovery nominated for 5 Saturn Awards.
Not surprised and delighted. ‘Magic’ is the best Trek episode since DS9 ended, IMHO.
Let’s not get carried away. Wilson is amusing and the episode is a decent entry in the Cause & Effect/Groundhog Day format. But even if one doesn’t care for Voyager or Enterprise, both have a number of episodes that equal or surpass ‘Magic’ in terms of writing.
Name some.
Oh jeez where to start, you’ve got the one where the Voyager crew are badly misrepresented in a Museum of the Future and you have the one where Neelix realizes heaven is all a lie and decides to kill himself. I mean don’t get me started on classic Voyager ‘sodes. The Enterprise people cite the one where they make a clone of Trip and they butcher him like a pig or whatnot. Then there’s the one with Vulcans watching television. Or who could forget Andorian Shran torturing Gary Graham or Trip and Malcolm getting drunk in a shuttlepod? Good times.
If we’re talking fun time travel romp episodes, I’d nominate Voyager’s “Relativity” for the good category. Okay, if you try to make sense of it, it might make your head explode, but it’s still fun to watch.
Fair enough, yeah. Those were good eps.
“Twilight” and “Similitude”, Star Trek: Enterprise.
Its funny third season is about the Xindi but Enterprise had a lot of fun and interesting standalone episodes that season too like those two you mentioned. But also loved North Star and E2 as well. Those felt like classic Star Trek stories and North Star felt like it was ripped out of TOS.
For Voyager, “Year of Hell,” “Living Witness,” “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Blink of an Eye” are top notch, with some underrated gems like “Faces,” “Drone,” “Bride of Chaotica,” “Meld” and “The Thaw” getting in there too. If we’re being sticklers to the OP’s comment about there not being anything as good as this Discovery episode since the summer of 1999, that only leaves “Blink of en Eye” for Voyager, and IMO I’d echo the comment that “Twilight” and “Similitude” deserve to be recognized as being top-tier episodes amongst all the series.
I agree, not being all that taken with “Magic” myself. But in all fairness, and in spite of my overall disappointment with the show, I thought Discovery‘s first season did in fact feature several episodes that were far superior.
Very doubtful DSC will take home that statue in any case.
LOL seriously? I liked the Sanest Man, but there are easily dozens of Voyager and Enterprise episodes that were much better.
Sanest Man just felt like the first traditional Trek episode with a cool sci fi twist on that show. Of course its not exactly new either but it was done in a fun way.
I do like The Thaw. That was a cool episode of Voyager that had some set designs that reminded me of TOS.
Solid episode. Jesse Alexander is no longer working on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m guessing the same is true for Aron Eli Coleite.
This episode was one of the worst episodes ever, no where near as good as All Good Things…
This DSC episode made me cringe so much, a Disco scene with every cliche of CW shows in it, the wounded soldier being honoured and the drink overflowing and the annoying Tilly being the drunk happy party girl, add on top of that the story that ‘borrowed’ from a better TNG plot, and TNG did it at a point when the device had not been used before.
And this gets the nomination?
I thought “Context is for Kings” and “Lethe” were much better shows, honestly.
I think parts of Lethe are better, but overall it isn’t as good… if that makes sense.
In my opinion Lethe was by far the best episode of the season. No other episode came nearly as close to it. Too bad they couldn’t have more eps like that. Who wrote that one? Oh yeah….
Isn’t that funny about opinions and taste?
I liked this Discovery episode, but Black Mirror should win. Superior stuff.
Black Mirror is superior in every possible way, imo.
There are episodes of Discovery that I thought were better than this one, so I’m surprised to see that THIS episode is the one that was nominated. Still happy to see it nominated, though.
Black Mirror will win, I bet. It’d be funny to see Trek lose to a parody of itself. But that also stems from the episode itself not being all that great, although it’s definitely the sweetest episode emotionally of the season.
I’m fine with choosing one of the most recognizably “Star Trek” episodes of the season.
It’s a slightly odd episode of “Doctor Who” they picked though. I know Steven Moffat is a Hugo favorite, but both of the last two episodes he wrote last year before Peter Capaldi’s exit are much much stronger.
Zero nominations for “The Expanse”? Every episode of that was twice as good as any episode of “Discovery.”
I’d imagine “USS Callister” will win, though.
Don’t know about your 2:1 quality ratio, but I’d definitely agree about the lack of attention/respect granted to The Expanse, which I thought had a great sophomore season. Too bad.
Wow, yeah that’s crazy, having The Expanse totally ignored. A lot of it was better than DSC.
Personally I thought that Black Mirror episode sucked.
Not for nothing, that episode of DSC was the only one of the season that got a chuckle or two out of me – when Mudd killed Lorca over and over in different ways.
I have watched that episode four times now, and enjoyed it each time. Isaacs and Wilson had a lot of fun.
So I literally just watched all 15 episodes of Discovery for the first time this weekend, and I like it. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Nonetheless, it still disappoints me that they didn’t maintain a little more of a bridge between the visual language of the original series and Discovery.
Klingons:
We’ve established that there are different looking Klingons out there, couldn’t we have had these Klingons and regular Klingons just to show that it’s a diverse population, rather than another retroactive design change… particularly after DS9 so effectively explained some of the original design changes away so well, and Enterprise went on to enhance the concept. Second, the new Klingons weren’t an improvement, they were hobbled by their heavy prosthetics to move and act effectively.
Starfleet:
The changes here are so drastic to what’s come before, that there is no alternative beyond a complete suspension of belief, which is annoying when the 50 odd years of Trek preceding Discovery has such a well established visual language and style. If someone said, let’s redesign the Death Star, Millennium Falcon, and Star Destroyer for Rogue One for a modern audience, I think you would have had a revolt. It could have been worked in such a way that would be as modern, fun and visually exciting as Discovery was without completely overhauling everything. It’s not a total deviation, but an extreme one nonetheless.
The rest of it:
The rest is subjective, uniforms change, other stuff is close enough… The sudden appearance of hologram communication seems out of place. No reason that couldn’t have stayed on screen as it does in every other series. Princess Leia didn’t change her style of message delivery in Rogue One from Hologram to onscreen. They kept it the same, because that’s how it was in 1977. It was a great moment from Last Jedi.
Anyway all of the debate about it is useless. It’s a good show, despite a handful of really dumb moments, but all shows have their dumb moments too. I’d like to see a step up on the continuity, slightly better motivations so we don’t have otherwise smart characters just opening doors with a beast known to have immense destructive power on the other side… and just a slight slow down on the pace to get to know some of the characters and their surroundings a little better.
Looking forward to more. DL
PS: Wouldn’t it be interesting for CBS to go back and take the original Star Trek, and give us a visual upgrade that fits somewhere in between Discovery and the series that came later. I’d buy that too.
The Good Place should win. I love that show so much and “Michael’s Gambit” was an absolutely amazing finale to the first season. It’s a shame they’ll probably split the vote since they have two episodes nominated.