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:
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…
Thanks for sharing those pics. Who knew star fleet turned into the Orville??
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 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…
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.
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.
How about a Kelvin TNG film? Picard with, if not a goatee, a little French mustache and cigarette?
