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.
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.
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.
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 want an entire show about Admiral Vance, because I’m in love with Oded Fehr’s voice.
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?
After careful thought…I’ll yield to season 7 of DS9. You pulled out the big guns. Haha.
@MajorHavoc so did the Breen 😍
But I’m honestly biased against Discovery anyway. I wanted to like it, wished I could love it, or even just enjoy it, but I just couldn’t. I do appreciate that they did take on feedback and improve it, it just isn’t for me. And neither is Picard S1 or S2.
Hold up now, no need to draw the objectively impeccable DS9 into the matter! I have genuine affection for large parts of Discovery, but no other Trek can hold a candle to Deep space nine.
I’ll give you points for controversial. I actually liked that season a good bit, but that is a pretty bold statement.
Yeah. Maybe too bold…I’m reconsidering my stance after some points were made about later seasons of DS9. Later DS9 seasons were fantastic.
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.
I liked the big reveal, but I can see how it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
Partial Spoiler
Normally when Trek is going to do a Trelane or Q story, it’s introduced early in the story. This was a weird left turn at the end, and leaves us wondering if any plotline later will also do so.
I didn’t mind it in this season, because the season was so focused on about values and tradition, so I wasn’t expecting a hard scifi conclusion. Realizing they were ‘doing a Doctor Who’, wasn’t too shocking to me.
But as much as I thought it fit here, it’s a weird way to resolve a Trek season, and I hope we don’t get that approach often.
I love it when they try to take risks and do something new or different with the IP. Even if it fails, the end result is still usually more interesting than a safe retread would have been. Disco isn’t my favorite Star Trek, but it is one of the most interesting entries in the franchise, and has done a lot to expand and solidify the 23rd century canon.
People forget how controversial the Battlestar Galactica reboot was. Same goes for Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Simply being different from the source material is not enough to make it bad. Discovery isn’t as good as either of these, but i’m glad it tried.
This is exactly what got me into Discovery! The willingness to go beyond convention and subvert viewer expectation.
So often throughout season one they’d hit me with something that I’d never seen done in Star trek before, and I’d be in the edge of my seat until next week. The whole introduction of the USS Discovery — which wasn’t until the third episode — had so much of a weird science vibe, I was blown away. And then the body horror of the USS Glenn.
Spore drives! Feral tardigrades! Space whales! All that, and pitting Starfleet in a war against Klingons that were really, truly alien for the first time in decades. Oh man, that was a wild ride, until they moored it with the dutiful canon connections in season two…
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 won’t miss it. The crying alien who caused the dilithium crisis was the final straw for me.
