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.
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.
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 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.
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:
Thanks for sharing those pics. Who knew star fleet turned into the Orville??
I saw a lot of hate for the Saturn class, and the arguments made sense assuming classic Starfleet designs and concepts.
I, however, love it because it begs the question: why? What is that for? And my mind jumps to all sorts of cool technobabble uses for such a weird ship design.
Some weird portal experiment? Evacuation ship made to maximize shuttle bay access? A specialized science ship designed with tons of inward-facing sensors? The mind boggles with possibilities.
The people who hated in it see wasted space. I see an unopened techno-mystery-box.
Oh those ships! Yeah, I think that episode skimped on the ship porn, I could have sat through another couple of minutes of that scene 🙂
Tbf, when you wrote “abstract art” my hopes were for a ship that looks like a 3D Jackson Pollock, but I can rationally see how, even in Star trek, that wouldn’t be feasible for space travel…
Discovery also seems to employ the dimensional technology that the pod from the future employed on Enterprise, being much bigger on the inside
That’s not new. Turbolifts on the Discovery were depicted that way pre-refit, back in the TOS-ish era. It’s a (mind-boggling) stylistic choice or something.
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.
Oh, never apologise for explaining such a good point at length! Ever so often watching Discovery I’ve had to remind myself that Burnham is partially raised Vulcan, and that that background at odds with her humanity is part of motivating her actions. Sometimes the writers are subtle about it, sometimes not so much.
discover (pun intended 😏)
Ah, I see what they did there…! 🤣
As for innovation seeping back into the shows, my hopes are also for a Starfleet academy show because it’s such a shift in setting and age group from what we’ve seen before. On the other hand, with Paramount dropping Prodigy and closing Disco to focus on SNW, they’re really circling the wagons around the well-known formulae and characters.
I sort of feel like Disco was our shot at reinventing Trek for the 21st century, and they dropped the ball early on.
