Missed opportunities in Season 1 and 2

Same here. I personally enjoy exploring more spiritual and philosophical themes. I don't have the reticence to telling religious-based stories, even if I don't agree with the POV. It's much more interesting to me than the complete avoidance of religious topics because they make individuals uncomfortable.

 

I think delving into real religion sounds better on paper than how it would work in reality. The moment you say one religion is correct and the others are wrong, forget it. I prefer enough room so that a viewer can decide for themselves. I would not appreciate Star Trek outright favoring one religion or a particular branch of a religion over another.

I don't believe in a Supreme Being because there's always room for improvement. Thus I think it's impossible to be supreme. I do believe there's a possibility for supernatural existence and for beings that might seem godlike but aren't "supreme", but I don't think a starship would be running into them hanging out in space.

And before someone mentions TFF, that proves my point. Sybok wanted to find God and all he found was something pretending to be. Beings existing on another plane of existence wouldn't be encountered in this one. At least not physically in the same dimension.

I also don't know if a show called Discovery would really be the place to delve into something it would be impossible for anyone to truly discover in their mortal lifetimes. It's forever un-discovered to society at large or anyone living. Which actually makes it the opposite of discovery. That's why "The Undiscovered Country" literally refers to death.

Once you die, you can't exactly go back and tell everyone else about it. Because you're dead! And even if you could, you can't talk to someone about something they can't picture in their mind because they're incapable of perceiving what's beyond our ability to understand. It would be like if you could see a new primary color. It's something you could imagine but the rest of us wouldn't be able to. We wouldn't know how. Or as Spock said, "It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference."

If you can never truly know, then all you can have is what you believe. Without proof of something, all you can do is have faith in it.

EDIT: While we're on this subject... Six years ago, someone tried to induct me into a Masonic Lodge. He wanted me to become a Freemason. He went into the whole spiel and then, after all that, asked me, "Do you believe in a Supreme Being?" Then I said I was agnostic. Then he up and said, "Oh, then you can't join." And that was the end of that. I felt bad for him going into the whole thing before he asked me that one critical question.

 

Biggest missed opportunity: T’Pol

 

A good writer wouldn't need to say anything about any religion being correct to do a story examining it.

She can still show up in the 32nd century.

 

Exactly. Even TFF, for all its failures, ends on such an interesting, thoughtful observation about a deity and where it might be.

I think there is a genuine fear around discussing religion but there is no need to say Christianity is right, Islam is right, Hinduism is right, etc. It can be just as simple as leaving the question open of what's out there.

This is largely my point of view. Spirituality, not just religion, are deeply personal things. Trek can explore spiritual questions without offering the answers or final conclusions.

 

Well, okay, but my point is that the were unable to jump away from the AI attack. No plot hole in this case.

 

Missed opportunity...to avoid bringing in the Enterprise and actually seeing Spock.

The more I think about it, as great as Pike was, IMO, S2 was too early to go to the heavy guns.

 

Considering DSC is going into the 32nd Century next season and staying there, S2 was "now or never".

Once you establish Burnham is Spock's foster sister, it's a cheat to not show him at least once. And just showing Spock as a child in a flashback is a cop-out.

 

Yeah, Spock needed to be brought into the show sooner rather than later anyway since there was no reason to establish Michael was his sister if we were never going to see him anyway. Indeed, in the first season there really wasn't anything unique to Sarek that meant it had to be Sarek and not any other Vulcan who raised Michael.

 

I think that was kind of a mistake because, really, Frain's acting meant they could have carried the show on a relationship between Michael and her Vulcan foster dad.

 

Disco was conceived as an anthology show originally, realised as a stand alone series but by season 2 (and I think 3 creative regimes) it's first of a sprawling Star Trek Universe. Plans changed and I'm guessing they decided to jump Disco to the distant future early on, since I recall prior to the season beginning they were saying this was the only time they could possibly tell this story.

 

It might've been earlier than a lot of us realize. I think the stories they told us in the 23rd Century were the stories they wanted to tell. Otherwise, they'd just be hanging around waiting for TOS to happen if they stayed there any longer. Can't do much with the Spore Drive (because we can't have it be too successful), can't shake up political alliances any further, and can't really get lost if they can just spore jump back.

My very first inkling of a time-shift was when the Spore Drive sent them nine months into the future when they got back from the Mirror Universe. My immediate thought was, "This is the equivalent of Doc sending Einstein one minute into the future when testing out the DeLorean in Back to the Future." Then I put two and two together. The Spore Drive couldn't take off in the 23rd Century, but there's no way a series would focus on a ship that's a failure, so it must jump into the future, and this series won't stay a prequel. Seeing "Calypso" drove it further home to me.

Just found a post of mine from March 28, 2018. The first time I mentioned this inkling. You'll notice I say what I'm really wondering about, but then I hedge my bets at the end just in case.

 

Missed opportunity 1: The dangers of technophilia. Cause: Troubles (a) with the Sphere's Tower of Babel via hijacking the universal translators, (b) with CONTROL. Result: Discovery's crew and Starfleet reconsider how much control can be safely surrendered to automation. This justifies the quaint look of TOS, but more importantly, it comments on our own age.

(Realistically, there would exist continuous tension between "more" and "less" camps, such that tech capability isn't monotonic. We can say that in early TOS, the UFP (or Starfleet, or just Enterprise) is in a "low" bend of the cycle, and the Daystrom M5 experiment is a foray by the "more" camp.)

Missed opportunity 2: CONTROL's motivation to obtain the Sphere Archive. "I want to become a better AI" isn't very convincing when it's already capable of faking video, hijacking ships and wearing Leland-suits.

Missed opportunity 3: Giving CONTROL's threat a credible scale. "Decimates the UFP core planets" should motivate the characters just as much as "permanently kills everyone in the galaxy."

Missed opportunity 4: Giving the Ba'ul a motivation, possibly one that shows Saru's assumptions about the biological order on Kaminar are largely mistaken. E.g., the Ba'ul are embarrassed to be the adult form of Kelpians, or the Ba'ul believe they're doing the galaxy a favor by keeping Kelpians in check.

 

I think the Ba'ul did make it very clear they considered the Kelpians horrifying enemies. The fact they show up later with the Ba'ul's technology makes me think they might have slaughtered them too.

I actually wouldn't mind if they went there because, well, the Ba'ul did unimaginably evil things and while you should never justify genocide in fiction--you also might comment on the fact victims of atrocities may not be inclined to forgive their attackers.

 

One thing I have been thinking about recently was instead of having Vulcan Hello/BOTBS be the first two episodes of the series, they would have used them as flashbacks to show how Burnham got into the position she did and intersperse it throughout the first half of the first season. We would have gotten to Discovery sooner and I think we could have understood Burnham better.

 

Yeah, starting out with Burnham in handcuffs would have been an interesting way to meet our protagonist. Gradually peeling back the onion to explain the mystery of her past (and make her more sympathetic) might have been a better approach than what we got.

 

IIRC, that was the original plan, to have the material from Vulcan Hello/Binary Stars play out as flashbacks over the course of the first half of season 1. But they had trouble fitting the material in among the seven episodes episodes, and then CBS mandated that Harry Mudd's Groundhog Day had to be a completely standalone episode, meaning they couldn't include flashbacks in there (despite it being a sequel to a previous episode) and ultimately it was decided that since there was enough material to fill two episodes, they'd just use that as a two-part premiere.