To me, the essence of what makes something ‘Star Trek’ is not to do with optimistic outlook or happy endings – there’s plenty of Trek without both. I also think ‘exploration’ is a vastly overstated part of Trek’s history. I think the ‘essence of Star Trek’ falls into three categories – sometimes seen simultaneously, sometimes not:
1) Star Trek is a Space Opera action adventure show set in space, with mysteries, plenty of good guys and bad guys, weird technology, aliens and more speeches and moralising than you might reasonably expect from the format.
2) Star Trek looks at issues of today or the past through a different lens to make a point about them or ask a question.
3) Star Trek does emotional, heart wrenching episodes about people, that don’t really have a message or a meaning, but are powerful in their own right.
So, do I consider Discovery to be Star Trek?
It certainly hits my point 1. Discovery is an action adventure show and quite a fun one at that. Even when it makes very little sense, it maintains a sense of problem-solving-in-space with a good bit of tech the tech and a side order of inappropriate speechifying. That’s Trek in the TOS sense, and was plenty visible through the Berman era too.
Point 2 - This is the contentious one for me. DSC has set out down a lot of really interesting paths. We’ve had PTSD, we’ve had sexual assault (on a male by a female), we’ve had imperialism, brinksmanship, torture, tribalism; we’ve had racism, we’ve had trust and betrayal, we’ve had ‘do the ends justify the means’, we’ve had inter arma enim silent leges, we’ve skirted the edges of populism. But we just can’t seem to close the deal on many (any?) of these. The main arc with Burnham’s attitude toward her ‘enemy’ is resolved, and in a pretty Treky way too. “Who you thought was your enemy is not once you get to know them” goes all the way back to The Corbomite Manoeuvre, especially coupled with “we have to be who we say we are”. Choose Your Pain had a Devil in the Dark/The Quality of Life storyline about the tardigrade which again went to the Trek formula. But that’s about it. Most other threads are left as just that – threads. We were missing the perhaps lower key episodes where they took one of the issues and really tore it apart like TNG’s The Drumhead or DS9’s Cardassians. Imagine if you will an episode which had addressed whether T’Kuvma’s criticism of the Federation – that they were essentially the British Empire with a Smile – is in any way valid. Or one that looked at what happened to the real Tyler charting the experience of a prisoner of war. That could have been really interesting. I’ll give DSC a ‘kind of, needs work’ on this one. Definitely room for improvement in season 2.
Point 3 – Discovery hasn’t really done one of these episodes yet. In fairness, neither had any of the other Treks by episode 15. We’re still waiting on an Inner Light, or a Visitor, or a City on the Edge of Forever. So DSC must get a technical fail on this point, but I see no reason why Discovery’s format precludes these episodes still to come.
So to me, it is Star Trek. Slightly wobbly legged, more so than I’d honestly hoped for, I think I’ve been quite frank elsewhere that the show didn’t live up to my expectations in some key areas and got far too bogged down in fanwank. But yes, it’s Star Trek, and has all the potential that TNG, DS9 or VOY had at this point, and more than ENT.
Entirely by the way, I don’t get the nuBSG comparison at all. With the possible exception of being serialised, it goes against nearly everything that nuBSG set out in its Bible that it wanted to be. Discovery has aliens and magic technology, it has ‘better’ humans, it has time travel and parallel universes, evil twins and bumpy foreheads, it isn’t ‘naturalistic’. It is exactly what Ronald D Moore walked away from to make BSG.
