Would Star Trek Discovery have benefited from an episodic format?
- Thread starter Yassa Justice
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The first two seasons of DS9 were absolute cold, wet mud as a result. I can barely slog through anything from those first two years, and gave up about 6 episodes in during first-run. And DS9 is easily my favorite 90s Trek show overall. Buy those first years were beyond ponderous.
Not to mention, DSC didn't have the luxury of 26 episodes per season nor the luxury of being relatively sheltered in the syndicated format. They needed to tell their story "right now" and no screwing around, because there might not be a tomorrow. So not only is DS9 not the perfect template, it's not even an apples-to-apples comparison I'm afraid.
I'm very pleased that DSC just swung for it right out of the gate. Flawed or not, I prefer Trek swinging for the fences rather than trying to meekly bunt it's way on.
For those who feel differently, the good news is that there's plenty of Trek that is episodic and meek, as well as a first run show on Fox that mirrors that old Voyager format to the letter. So there's plenty for everyone.
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How exactly was Discovery "swinging for the fences"? It plays exactly like the cold, wet mud you accuse DS9 of being during its first couple of seasons.
I'd say Discovery came out with 4 flat tires and a busted engine.
I think they had something with the cast, but a writer's room that couldn't decide what this show was? So we got a tepid mess that hung on TOS callbacks as the backbone.
I'd say Discovery came out with 4 flat tires and a busted engine.
Which is still far better than any other post-TOS Trek series, so things are looking up.
Well I'd say DS9 did pretty well. I can't speak on VOY or ENT as I couldn't commit to either of them. A lot of post TOS didn't really resonate with me honestly. I love TOS and DS9. TNG was mostly hit and miss for me and I couldn't get into Voyager or Enterprise. Both failed to grab me by episode 5 of each respective series. I tried to be fair. I was super excited for Discovery because it was going back to or rather very close to the TOS era which I love dearly. I was just so let down by it. I wanted to love it but I was ultimately disappointed.Which is still far better than any other post-TOS Trek series, so things are looking up.
Sounds like you dislike more of the franchise than you actually like.
DSC is the first TV Trek I haven't been disappointed in right out of the gate in season one since TNG (although I loved the DS9 and VOY pilots...just that the rest of those first seasons didn't live up to them.
Fortunately, post TOS Trek typically improves greatly after the first season. Even more after the second.
I wouldn't say dislike but rather indifferent on. I do want to give the others a chance at some point. They play TOS through ENT on one of my channels and I give them the occasional watch. I am eager to give ENT another chance after seeing that Vulcan Zombie ship episode. That was pretty cool. I enjoy all the movies with the exception of Generations, Insurrection and Nemesis. So I do enjoy quite a lot of Trek. Taking on VOY and ENT would be quite the undertaking but I'm willing to roll my sleeves up and give it another go.
If STD was anything, it was timid.
3rd and 4th season of ENT are worth watching but skip the series finale episode. 3rd season had a season long arc but individual episodes (like the Vulcan zombie episode) were very good as both standalone episodes and as part of the longer arc. They did a nice balance there. 4th season had some great Birth of the Federation mini arcs, but the final episode was terrible.
I'm exaggerating a bit. I don't think anyone actually have come out and directly accused Orville of violating Gene's Vision, but the season 1 discussion threads were filled with people measuring it to the standards of Star Trek with statements like "they don't make penis jokes on Star Trek" is response to Orville's jokes on that subject.
Again, it wouldn't have mattered. Fuller likely would still have dicked around and used the budget up, this derailing the show and postponing its premiere by nine months regardless. Whether or not it was stand alone or a story arc wouldn't have made a difference either way.
Having rewatched both shows in recent years, I will say they are much better than I remember from their broadcast. Voyager in particular has a much more engaging cast than I originally gave them credit for.
DS9 was also a product of its time, transitioning from one format to another. This other format being one that B5 adopted from the get-go, VOY avoided, and ENT only adopted when it was threatened with cancellation. But a lot of series in the '90s and early-'00s toyed around with episodic vs. serialization and had both.
Any serialized series I've watched in this decade was serialized to begin with and I got to know the characters, or at least what I need to know about them, just fine.
And with all these Star Trek series CBS All Access wants to put out, I highly doubt all of them will run seven seasons. People need to get the Standard Seven Season Model out of their head. That's not the way it's going to be anymore. "They should wait until the _th Season!" is a thing of the past. Where it should stay.
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I'de say that in terms of "adventurousness" DSC is probably on par with most other streaming and cable shows of it's kind.
But for a Trek show, DSC's a quantum leap forward from TOS, which moved the needle forward in terms of what was acceptable, for all shows in it's day, and DS9, which did the same for Trek shows back in the 90's. However, shout out to Ent for taking on a story about addiction involving, of all things, a Vulcan, something I don't think would have been okay for previous Trek shows, at least not for the heros of those shows.
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I agree with this in general. The issue with the season was fundamentally the writing team bit off more than they could chew.
One could make the argument though that once whatever master plan Fuller developed fell apart they should have lowered their expectations considerably. Basically, spend the first season kicking the tires. Develop the characters in a semi-episodic/loosely serialized fashion, which allows you to pull out the best threads from the first season to develop the second (and hopefully later) seasons.
FWIW, Berman Trek felt much more like a soap to me than Discovery does, whether or not it was episodic like TNG or VOY, or semi-serialized like DS9.
ENT's 3rd season isn't as serialized as people credit it as being. I would say that just as is the case for DS9 much of it is semi-serialized, but little of it is true serialization.
Basically, the difference between serialization was explained awhile back by Chuck at SFdebris. It comes down to if an episode directly follows the previous episode, or if some unknown amount of time has passed, but events in the previous episode were referred to. Basically, semi-serialization has room for "stories within the stories" which can be fleshed out in fanfic or novels. Truly serialized stories do not. ENT's 3rd season was thus not truly serialized - the Xindi threat threaded everything together, and earlier episodes were often referenced, but it was not one grand adventure. For that matter, Act 1 of the first season of Discovery was only semi-serialized, not fully serialized. The early episodes (following the two parter) generally had discrete A/B plots, and there was some sort of time jump between many of them. It was only with Act 2 that Discovery shifted to having essentially one long story.
It depends upon what you're talking about.
If you're talking about something like TNG/VOY, where the characters don't really change much over the course of the show, and nearly everything is resolved by the episode's end (unless they later write a "sequel") that would be awful.
But it's possible to serialize character development while still making large portions of the plot semi-episodic. I'd actually say this is the norm in modern serialized dramas which are not based upon books or something (for example, BSG had discrete episodes, but The Expanse really doesn't). This way the individual episodes build upon each other like pieces of a puzzle, but they're still separate enough that you can have individual episodes with their own themes and character focus.
The thing is that episodic and serialized exists on a spectrum. Someone who says that they'd like Discovery to be less serialized might not be pining for the days of Voyager. They may simply want to have a format which is more DS9-like - allowing the characters to change and grow but also a great variety in terms of stories which can be told.
I mean, consider all of the different stories which Trek has told over the years. Everything from action-adventure to comedy, romance to spy thriller, character study to western, message episode to horror. If Discovery hewed to a very tight serialized format as it did in the Mirror Universe, you couldn't really accomplish this wide variety of stories. You could basically only tell one story per season. IMHO that is a tremendous loss, but YMMV.
I do think it's generally true that serialized stories in TV are much harder to write unless:
1. You're working from an established framework (like a book).
2. You have a very small writing team which is responsible for the story in the majority of the episodes.
3. You have everything figured out in the first season far ahead of time.
Discovery failed to hit any of these. Like it or hate it, the story was pretty clearly just them winging it once Fuller was out of the picture. That's a very risky endeavor in serialized drama, because you're basically promising to deliver some payoff that you haven't even figured out yet at all.
What I really don't want is for them just to take episodic Trek tropes and stretch them way out, which is what I thought we got in season 1. We had a standoff with one-dimensional Klingons, a lift of Devil in the Dark, and then a long jaunt to the one-dimensional Mirror Universe. Even if I give the most charitable read to what they were trying to do -- to show how the Federation rediscovers its values in an ugly time -- they don't actually show how the Federation rediscovers its values. Instead, they abruptly wrap it up like every other Trek show, with a big speech from Burnham that could have come out of the Omega Glory. That's fine when you're telling a complete morality play in 45 minutes, but I expect something more sophisticated from a modern serialized drama.
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When weren't the Klingons one dimensional onscreen besides TOS?
I disagree here. Like anything it comes down to the abilities of the involved writers. I got more tension out of "Krill" and "Firestorm" from The Orville than I did the twelve episodes of Discovery I watched combined.
If Discovery had been on CBS or CW then perhaps an episodic style would've worked better. Plus, the show's name "Discovery" would fit an episodic style more IMO, where we are seeing the ship and crew actually doing more discoveries (there was some discovery in the show we got, but not as much of the gee wow it's new worlds and science stuff in some previous Treks). But with the series put on All Access I get why they went with arc-based storytelling. That's pretty standard for streaming series. IMO, they wanted to hook viewers and keep them coming back week after week and arc storytelling works better to get people more invested (and feeling they don't want to get behind or lost) than a series of more loosely connected episodes which might start meandering. I feel the constraints of the streaming service determined how they felt it was best to tell the story.
As an aside, I think "Discovery" is too grand, sweeping a name for the darker, more introspective show that we got. I wish they had gone with another name for the ship.
As an aside, I think "Discovery" is too grand, sweeping a name for the darker, more introspective show that we got. I wish they had gone with another name for the ship.
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