The Orville was a better Star Trek than STD.
Mmmmm yes and no.
Orville definitely had a lot more of the 90s ST vibe. And the first season being the more comedy/parody oriented season is amusing at parts (though, for recursive humor, gotta give it to LD).
But where I think Disco excels - and by that I mean perhaps an order of magnitude more and in a much more overt manner - is how they do a remarkably good job of showing and telling the audience about radical empathy and acceptance with both character and story. These themes imo are, incidentally, the primary moral and societal virtues of the UFoP.
But yeah, I absolutely agree the world building is lazy as all fuck, the direction and writing are… variable, and there are a handful of scenes that I would call the acting outright “cringey” (for fucks sake Burnham shut the fuck up about that one paragraph you memorized from Alice in wonderland because you thought it sounded cool and edgy nobody cares)
Don’t disparage those girls by comparing them to Discovery.
Star Trek Discovery is a perfect example of how to build wonderful support characters and ideas, but have terrible main characters and story execution.
Literally all of the supporting characters, like Saru, Tilly, Staments, Culber, Reno, Adira…they’re fantastic characters.
Burnham, and by virtue nearly every character she frequently interacts with, are tainted. She’s a Mary Su, fixer of all things, get out of writer’s block free card. Even when they “kick her down”, she still comes back as the solution when the writers run out of ideas. Even when she jumped into the future, the writers just couldn’t fucking help themselves with the prions and making her immediately say “I’m smart and the best. You should do this” to an admiral with an entire swath of doctors and advisors available. Somehow she’s jumped hundreds of years into the future and is supposed to be out of her depth, but is the expert? Fuck off.
Saru and Tilly somehow comes out mostly untainted, but Georgio, Booker, etc. all get overshadowed by her shit character design by virtue of being joined at the hip with her story.
Also, the stories always build up to some “grand reveal” that is utterly stupid. Dilithium exploded because feelings. DMA “oops our bad” aliens. Shitty Klingons. An AI that never heard of backups.
The most interesting arcs are the Emerald Chain, Aroam’s sacrifice, and Zora. Like…Ariam’s sacrificial story was AMAZING. Why tf didn’t they do stories like that the rest of the time???
If they had spent less time making Burnham the solution to everything while promoting her shit self to Captain and written things that built to a satisfying conclusion, it could have been a good show.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good show.
I will go to my grave insisting that Tilly is the most grating, annoying character in Star Trek. How does she go from a bumbling idiot to an officer in like two seasons? They tried too hard to make her character progress and they pushed it too far
I don’t mind Tilly’s character. Her growth felt organic to me. She just always had a lack of confidence. At least she started out bad at everything and lacking confidence and they developer her. Michael just STARTED as the miracle child and then they had to pathetically try and claw her back.
That said, I can understand why some people didn’t like her. She wasn’t for everyone.
Her growth was my issue, if she had started as a bumbling, no confidence ensign and ended as a confident crew member on her way to joining officer school (which takes like 8 years!) that would be believable growth. But she went from a bumbling no confidence ensign to a badass commander/officer. The show wasnt long enough for that level of growth.
I think the mirror universe arc was the best. The idea of going into the far future was good, if poorly executed. I also worry they’ve written themselves into a corner now. It’s going to restrict any media set post TNG but pre Discovery.
It’s no more limiting to TNG era stories than the TNG era itself was to TOS era stories. They can’t blow up the Earth or genocide any major races, but beyond that we’ve been given very little information about any character’s future. I didn’t find Star Trek VI any less exciting because I knew the Klingon empire would still be around 80 years later, and I’d say SNW is flourishing under far tighter restrictions.
Yay! I get to repost my comment about Disco Season 5 that got me banned from Ten Forward:
Regarding how the writers failed with their Spore Drive conclusion in Season 5:
The idea of the lone inventor wasn’t even true a hundred years ago. When I took a history of technology class at University over 30 years ago, that fact was driven into us. All discoveries are the result of researchers standing on the shoulders of giants. Destroying all Spore drive research is meaningless because there are hundreds of billions of people spread across thousands of planets. The Federation isn’t even the entire Alpha quadrant so there are hundreds of billions of other people with no restrictions. So someone else is going to almost immediately re discover spore drive because the technology and knowledge base for its discovery are built into society.
I hope the above opinion doesn’t get me banned here too.
Discovery was only an introduction to strange new worlds which I adore
I didn’t finish S1 of Disco Mycelium but when I heard that S2 was S0 of SNW, I went ahead and watched it. The SNW cast was the best of it by far. I wasn’t thrilled with Spock at first but my mind was changed by the end.
I had zero interest in continuing to watch Disco Mycelium.
