On the end of Discovery
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.
And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham's personal relationships took priority over everything else.
This is the part that I’ve never got on well with in Discovery.
In TNG, it’s not a show about Picard, or Riker, or any of the other individuals. It’s a show about the crew. I’ve even seen it said that the actual star of the show is the ship.
Whereas, with Disco, it’s a show about Michael Burnham and everyone else has a bit part. That always felt weird for a Star Trek show. I want to see how the crew works together to solve problems and overcome things with everyone on an equal footing regardless of their rank in the show.
And I think that’s why there was such a warm reception to season 3 of Picard. It brought the crew back together. Picard alone isn’t satisfying enough. What we wanted was him as part of the crew.
Yeah, I agree in part with your points. Any Star trek show should be an ensemble effort, and that's why, of the newer shows, Lower Decks is much more my bag.
FWIW, I thought the Burnham focus worked in season 1 as our POV into the war setting and previously unseen Trek periode. We got to know the crew through her as she worked her way back into Starfleet. But yeah, past that the "it's all about Michael" approach became a detriment to the show. There was literally a whole crew to explore like they did, only somewhat, with Saru.
With Picard, I expected the new crew of La Sirena to crystallise around the main character and become a new constellation — but no. Season 2 turned into a strange Gothic exploration of Picard's past, and one that actually contradicted what we know about the character. If Chabon hadn't left the writer's room, I think we would have seen a more compelling story.
I did enjoy parts of the final PIC season, but it felt like it was written by somebody who didn't really get what TNG was about. The old crew felt two-dimensional, like clichés of themselves, showing up for a cameo and dropping a quip. But I'm already veering way off from the Disco focus of my post 🙂
I feel like that would have worked considering that Burnham starts the show kind of as this hotshot. If the character development focused on the move from being an individual who thought she could do everything and needed no one else into someone realizing that she couldn’t live without the crew, it could have been a good show. There were glimpses of that in the show (the Mudd episode, for example where it literally took everyone to bring him down) but they always went back to everything is about Michael. It felt very similar to how I feel getting sick of how Star Wars can’t get away from the Skywalker family. Every story can’t always be about one character and their immediate family. It gets old.
I'll disagree with a couple of points here.
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.
This presumes that technology always develops at the same pace (it doesn't), and also ignores the two major cataclysms that the Federation endured, in the form of the Temporal Wars and the Burn. And even then, we see that the technologies we're used to are faster and more efficient (the transporters are absolutely nuts), and we've seen new developments such as programmable matter. The pre-Burn Starfleet ships we've seen look like abstract art installations, and I think they absolutely look like they're well beyond anything we saw 900ish years prior.
As for Burnham...while it's indisputable that she's the main character of the show, the entire principal cast gets plenty to do - much more than they tend to get credit for, which is a shame. They're a great ensemble.
I agree about fluctuating rates of technological progress, but surely not at the scale of almost a millennium. I did expect some more creative choices from a production standpoint; like the thoughts and development that went into the (far closer) future technology of Minority report.
Yes, Disco's personal transporter in the 32C was a pretty big deal, but only a logical progression from what had already been established throughout the series. "Programmable matter" was really just techno babble for hand held replicators, or 3D printers really — and detachable nacelles, how does that even work?
I will rewatch the show before the final season, and I look forward to another peek at the pre-Burn ships you mention. As I recall we barely saw them before they exploded but your description definitely makes me want to revisit those scenes!
On the balance between ensemble and lead focus — I think we're more aligned here than it seems. I wanted more scenes from crew perspectives because what we got was so good in terms of acting and chemistry, and the cast were clearly up to carrying the show to a greater degree if they got the chance.
[Edit because apparently I can't spell "development"]
“Programmable matter” was really just techno babble for hand held replicators, or 3D printers really
From what we've seen so far, I don't think that's quite true. For example, there's no indication that programmable matter is edible. It also seems to be able to assume its forms with little-to-no power input, once it's been programmed to do so. I hope we get to see its advantages and limitations more in the future (heh), but I really do think it's a unique technology.
detachable nacelles, how does that even work?
Superconductors, according to "That Hope Is You, Part 2".
I will rewatch the show before the final season, and I look forward to another peek at the pre-Burn ships you mention. As I recall we barely saw them before they exploded but your description definitely makes me want to revisit those scenes!
I should clarify, then, that I'm talking mainly about the ships we saw clustered around Federation Headquarters in season 3. Maintaining the cloaking field around HQ sadly kept them out of the action, but some of them are gorgeous. My personal faves (and I'm going to unabashedly pull from outside sources like STO to get the best possible images):
Eisenberg-class:
Courage-class:
Saturn-class:
Angelou-class:
And of course, it turns out that Federation HQ itself is a fully-capable starship:
Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking "alright, not bad, I'm excited to watch this show grow the beard."
But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don't care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I'll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.
As much as I like SNW, it's still not quite the show I've been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era... even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.
Man, I was so not into seasons one-three. I watched each one hoping it would just calm tf down and tell one story well instead of bouncing all over the place. But then season four came along and it was one of my favorite Trek seasons ever of any series. And what do people say about it? That it was too slow. I can't win! Looking forward to five tho.
My problem with season 4 wasn't that it was slow, but that it was uninspired and by-the-numbers. I had worked out that the DMA was a "stepping on an anthill" situation by... episode 4, maybe? 5 at the latest. So then I got to watch one of the oldest tropes in sci-fi unfold for 8 more episodes, played completely straight. Yawn.
I'd rather watch the B-plot from S01E06 of Babylon 5 to experience that particular story again. That way I'd be done in an hour.
I think we have one obvious reason why season 1 was so solid: Bryan Fuller. He came to Trek with fresh ideas and thoughts about how to use them creatively in that setting. And he envisioned Disco as an anthology show that would focus on different eras each season, so the Burnham arc was one season, on to the next.
A lot clearly changed even before the show went into production, at which point he was out and Paramount probably reneged on doing new casting and design work for each new season. We'll probably never know what could have been, and perhaps an anthology show would have the same dip in interest as it moved on.
For what it's worth, the jump between seasons 2 and 3 did make that kind of radical change in setting that an anthology sets out to — but preserved the characters who had just fulfilled their mission to hide the sphere data, so there's a contradiction in terms. And more to the point, the writers didn't seem to know what to do with the characters once they made it to the future.
The evolution of Zora was an inspired idea (and literally cripped from Michael Chabon's Calypso) but only became a detached plot strand, and Detmer's PTSD was a gut punch only dealt with too superficially. So you're right, despite some character highlights season three was meandering and listless. The crew had a whole future to explore, but no mission.
Rebuilding the Federation should have filled that hole with direction (or at least directives) but there wasn't a lot of purpose to the space UN once it was restored. Maybe that dead water feels so frustrating because we're seeing its literal mirror image in the deterioration of diplomacy and parliaments on the news every day. When Disco gets political it doesn't mess around, but here it couldn't deliver a show of common purpose because it was barely coherent itself. But I digress.
[Edit: misleading preposition]
@halm @GuyFleegman I really wish I saw in S1 what you all seem too. To me it's a weirdly disjointed season:
Part 1: Introduction two parter, set up Burnham.
Part 2: Klingon War
Part 3: Mirror Universe
Part 4: Oops, forgot the Klingons! Wrap up.I LOVED Lorca and his arc, that was very good. But the season itself doesn't hang together as a consistent serialised story, it feels like they were halfway through shooting and had to suddenly make 4 more episodes, and it shattered the story.
I want an entire show about Admiral Vance, because I'm in love with Oded Fehr's voice.
Right? Put Lorca on the front of my list to round out all four seasons. The outsiders carry the cast.
I won’t miss it. The crying alien who caused the dilithium crisis was the final straw for me.
Yep, that was beyond ridiculous IMO. Not sure how they felt it made enough sense to turn into a big season-long thing, affecting the entire future timeline of Star Trek.
Though I think Species 10-C (season 4) was an awesome episode that is rather underrated.
the cruel irony is that the only reason that Kelpiens are even spacefaring is because Discovery intervened the previous season, in that regard Discovery caused the burn
I liked the crying alien. Trek is full of zany Q-like entities whose whims cause fallout for everyone else.
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.
I have a tendency to wait for seasons to be completed before marathoning them, with a few exceptions. The problem with that approach is that I can fall away from shows as new ones come out, and forget to circle back. Despite being a huge Trek fan (I can’t estimate the number of times I’ve rewatched TNG, DS9, and VOY), I’m behind on all of the new Treks.
I am a fan of Michelle Yeoh. She’s one of my favorite actors, and I’ll go out of my way to watch whatever she’s in. Stamets was a favorite character, and more often than not it was his plot lines that pulled me along into the next episode. I mean, I’m a biologist with mycophobia, and I still obsessed with his personal, romantic, and scientific journeys.
I just could not get into Burnham, though. One of the reasons I loved DS9 so much was that Sisko was about as close to a realistic military officer as Trek has come. I love Picard and Janeway, but Sisko was the only one who I felt could have been someone I knew during that stage of my life. There was still plenty of Trek going on, but when he got military, you could tell.
Burnham was the exact opposite. It was like every single decision point was where she’d do the least military and even the least Starfleet thing. I could throw around words like selfish or immature, but it wasn’t even restricted to that. And they were entirely broadcasted and predictable - I’d be watching and say “Oh, please don’t let her do X,” and sure enough she’d do X. This wasn’t a plot point or a flawed hero motif, it was built into the character.
I loved Milly. I loved Saru (love anything Doug Jones does). But Burnham was terrible, and the show revolved more and more around her. She wasn’t a femme Kirk or a woke Janeway. She was like a privileged 15 year old given command in a galaxy-spanning military/scientific/governmental organization.
I will make it back to the new Treks. I’ve finished all of my Taika Waititi shows, I just did my Nth rewatch of Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place, and I’m still a couple months away from redoing The Other Two. I need to scratch my sci fi itch. I just don’t know if I’m going to make it back to Disco before doing something else like SNW or Picard, or yet another pass through the old Treks.
Thanks for this. I love your personal perspectives and insights on Stamets and Sisko!
You're absolutely right that Michelle Yeoh is a treasure, and her visible joy at playing an operetta villain was all the bts reason they needed to keep her on screen that long. Within the story though, her character was so irredeemable it didn't make a lick of sense.
Speaking as someone who has made counterintuitive, spur of the moment decisions, however, I thought Burnham's character was quite realistic 🙂 Terrible perhaps — me too — but thoroughly human. And I respectfully disagree, she is very much a female Kirk type in my eyes. They go 1:1 on following their gut instinct over Starfleet protocol, though maybe Kirk hijacked more ships in the process.
When you do make it back to Trek, seeing how you're into comedy shows as well, I really recommend you to watch Lower decks. It's a loving, dedicated bear hug of a tribute to the franchise, and has characters written with heart, too.
I’ve loved what I’ve seen of Lower Decks but my partner has a things against animated tv shows. I haven’t been able to watch it as a series as a result, but everything I hear about it makes me want to find a way to do it.
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
There's a reason for that
Oh, you read as far as you needed to find an easy angle for... whatever point you're trying to make. Good for you. This is what I wrote immediately after:
I’m not here to argue for or against
I needed to type out my feelings about Discovery, not to be dragged into poorly manufactured conflicts. Feel free to pick a fight somewhere else unless you have something to say, and LLAP.
Yeah I read as far as I needed to, as in, I read all of it because the part I quoted was at the end. And for doing so, I should be praised and thanked, because it wasn't a good read.
I've read through two threads recently on DIS, and I have found nobody talking about S4. Did everyone just give up at S3? Did we all forget about "growing the beard" and how long it can take a show to get it's legs?
S4 is my favorite season of DIS. Species 10-C was some of the coolest new sci-fi for Star Trek in a while. The overarching plot was interesting in that it had high stakes, but it didn't feel oppressive like other seasons. It still had a sense of hope and optimism. A lot of the characters got to expand their roles and relationships, feeling more like an ensemble.
I know there was some stuff that didn't hit well in that season, but I can't recall the details off hand (like I can for S1-S3). In my memory, the good outweighed the bad.
I am hopeful that S5 meets at least that mark, and hopefully glides into a graceful ending for the show. If I had my wish, S5 would make a switch to a more episodic style (rather than a big season-long central plot).
I think a lot of people enjoyed S4 quite a bit, and would agree with you in saying it's best of the series so far (I personally prefer S3, but they're both pretty solid IMO).
S5 should be an interesting project - based on what they've said so far, it's still going to be a single arc, but with more of a scavenger hunt/adventure tone.
You're right, for my part I don't have a distinct memory of season 4 — maybe because I haven't rewatched it yet in preparation for s5 🙂 Season 3 felt lacklustre to me, the 32nd century was decidedly underwhelming, and my esteem for s4 may have been coloured by that Discovery fatigue.
As I recall, there was a lot of build-up before actually meeting the 10-c, and that I found the Arrival-style challenges of even communicating with them more interesting than whatever that guy from The expanse had going on? His character was as unconvincing as Jake Weber's bored pirate in s3.
I'm looking forward to rewatching all of the first four seasons again to catch up before the last one, and hopefully on this wuewing s4 has as much kick as you describe 😉
I personally liked Ruon Tarka. He felt like a good foil for our protagonists. Sympathetic, believable, but still squarely in the wrong. I did not, however, believe Book siding with him for so long.
But I agree the coolest parts of S4 were at the end, trying to actually learn about the 10-C for first contact.
I definitely agree with you. While I didn't like a lot of the elements of Disco season 1, it had a genuineness that was really compelling. Season 2 corrected the things I personally didn't like but kept the heart and soul which has made it some of the finest modern Trek in my opinion. Season 3 was alright I suppose, but didn't have that spark of authenticity. I'm dubious about anything more from Disco.
The big issue for me is also the show centering on Burnham. Season 2 put her along side Anson Mount's Pike which balanced the scale nicely and their personalities played well together, but other than that Burnham has always felt like the main character of a CW show to me. I don't know if it's the writing for her character or the acting, but she's a weak point of the show to me. Doug Jones on the other hand has been incredible and I could watch him play Saru all day 😄
For what it's worth, I'll maintain that Burnham's character was great in driving action forward (ie. throwing herself blindly into conflicts), and I think Sonequa Martin-Green has been a terrific actor and ambassador for Trek and Disco. If the show instead had put that much focus on Saru or, heck, Bryce over the course of four (soon five) seasons, that would have been a bit much, too.
That's very true, and as an actor Sonequa does really give the role everything she has. I think that touches on one of the other commenter's points a bit: Trek seems to thrive when they balance the story load between characters. When a lot of plot weight is put on to one character it starts to feel like they are simply a plot device. I've heard complaints about Kirk in TOS suffering from this as well, but perhaps nostalgia keeps me from being too offended 😄.
Your comment made me realize something that is a the root of why I never connected with the Michael Burnham character or Sonequa's acting, and its linked (from a writing perspective) to Ethan Peck's Spock: they're both portraying the clash of human and Vulcan culture, with a few key differences. Spock is a half-vulcan, half-human that was raised and shaped by Vulcan culture. Ethan portrays someone who is firmly rooted in logic, but struggles to control the human emotional elements within him. The key to his character growth is accepting and unifying the two halves of himself (although Trek as a series is not always clear about this. Sometimes it seems they indicate he does best when suppressing the human side, not integrating it.) Burnham is full human and raised through her formative years by human parents, but then goes through a massive childhood trauma and is adopted and given formal training on Vulcan. Sonequa portrays someone who tries to firmly root herself in logic, but who suffers greatly because that denies the experience of her inner self. The key to her character growth is rebelling against the expectations others (and she herself) had put on her in order to discover (pun intended 😏) who she actually is. Which of these two struggles we connect with depends on our own childhood and emotional make up, and the other may seem foreign and empty simply because we haven't experienced it. Spock's struggles always seemed more realistic and balanced to me with Burnham coming across like a teenage edgelord rebelling against her parents. I think now I'll be looking at it very differently, and it makes me excited to see what Season 4 brings. I might do some rewatches of the early seasons too, if I can ever finish working my way through Voyager 😅. Thank you for your comment, sorry mine is so long, brevity is not my strong suite 😵💫
And one more thing I agree with from your original post: Star Trek as a franchise really struggles "To boldly go where no one has gone before" anymore. The studio clearly values success over quality and the reliance on nostalgia for current shows is very disappointing. There are glimmers here and there, maybe the section 31 movie will bring some fresh air to the writing table.
Here's a controversial opinion for y'all: The season of Discovery with the broken remnants of the Federation examining how and if to bring back the Federation is the best season of Trek ever made, to date.
@MajorHavoc @halm better than season 7 of DS9? Or (most of) S4 of Enterprise? Ok, to each their own. It was better than the previous two seasons of Disco, the story was better planned and the episode quality more consistent, but why do you think it's the best ever?
It’s not my favorite but it’s up there. I think the premise of all the dithium exploding and seeing “the far future that feels less future” that the OP described was actually really cool to me. The previous season where Burnham has the magic flying angel rocket suit was pretty stupid and made it feel like there were no stakes.
When you put it that way, yeah. That would have been interesting to watch. It wasn't really my experience of where the season's focus lay, though.
I have to disagree on one count, the rest I agree with. The entire show sucked, every season. Had some good visual effects, but the story was garbage, the new klingons were absolutely a joke, and the individual episode plots were all just too soap opera and not enough Star Trek.
Like I said, I know where I'm in the minority — the show being cancelled is certainly a sign that Paramount lost faith in it — so I can only speak for the things I enjoyed to begin with. And although we disagree about those, we can still have a respectful back and forth about it 👍
Definitely, a lot of my initial enthusiasm was driven by just having new Star trek on screen again, but while I did see great potential in season 1 — hoo-boy, did it go downhill from there.