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On the end of Discovery

I have mixed feelings about Disco ending. I really dug the first season's look at a Federation at war, and following the person who arguably set that war in motion dealing with her culpability. Add to that a ship that is part weird science lab, part haunted house. And yeah, I could live with the Klingon redesign.

It was inventive, it took risks and broke some moulds — and not always successfully, mind you. But I stuck with it from the hopeful "First three seasons are for growing pains" Trek paradigm.

Then the show took some odd turns. Rather than focusing on the crew's adventures in space and science, season two constructed a cosmic conundrum around Burnham and her family. I was still on board for the characters, even bearded Spock no matter how shoehorned in he felt. The show's unapologetic optimism was still a big selling point, too.

With season three came the time jump into a future that absolutely does not feel like it's a thousand years ahead of the previous season. The jump in technology should be proportional to a Viking longboat rocking up to the ISS, but it felt like a step back. And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham's personal relationships took priority over everything else.

For one example: As great as Michelle Yeoh is, the show basically redeemed a murderous space despot because... she reminded Burnham of her Starfleet counterpart?! I'm going to stop you right there, Captain "This is Starfleet" — this is a person who kept rubbing in Saru's face how familiar she was with the taste of his species' flesh.

I'll keep watching Disco through to its end because I'm invested in the remaining characters, but this isn't the show I apprehensively fell in love with anymore. Its strengths are all but gone, its faults enhanced, and its commercial(?) failure seems to have convinced the Powers That Be that future Star Trek needs to be grounded in nostalgia for previous eras.

I will miss the first season's promise of new, daring Trek shows writ large, and as much as I liked Pike and his crew in season two, SNW leans too heavily and knowingly on the franchise's campier canon for my taste (I know I'm in a minority with that opinion, and I'm not here to argue for or against). With peak TV fading, I'm afraid we won't see anything as bold as TNG, DS9 — or early Discovery — again.

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  • I'm not a huge fan of Discovery but I do hope we can get a balance between bold and new and the sort of nostalgia bait we're in now. I mean, I love SNW, and it's really filling out some canon gaps (love Uhura getting some real attention) but I really want to get away from cameos. They felt cheap in Disco S2 and they're still cheap in SNW, but the writing is so much better it's forgivable. PIC and LD are also very rooted in referencing old Trek. Hell, even Prodigy couldn't resist making Janeway a (sort of) main character.

    This is why I'm low key hyped about the Academy show, and am hoping it's with Tilly in the far future. Give us Disco's great, inclusive cast as peripheral characters, maybe even flesh them out more, but shift the focus to a class of cadets working as a team. Get back to that optimism and away from Burnham and whatever's destroying the universe this season, without needing to root the show in old Trek.

    • I genuinely think Trek needs to get over its Kirk/Spock fetish. Beside SNW, there are still talks about another Kelvin film. If I'm honest, when that stalled over negotiations with Chris Pine, I hoped they'd just go on and make a one-off film where Sulu, McCoy and Uhura get to save the day on their own. Even then, why stick with that period?

      I'm cautiously optimistic about the Starfleet academy show if it materialises. It could fall into either "The OC in space" or some kind of Top gun, West Point show bound to reenact "The first duty". Tawny New some seems to be on board as a writer, so I'm hopeful.

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