DISCO was an unnecessary prequel. Let me be clear that I'm not saying DISCO is without merit. I like the series though I wish it hadn't made the unforced errors it did right out the starting gate, and a lot of that came from making the series a prequel. I agree with those who feel that DISCO's premise didn't necessitate for the series to be a prequel. If it had been set after Nemesis, I think it might have been better received overall, even from a number of it's detractors right now.
Definitions may vary but what does a prequel do? (I think they fill in gaps, expand on potentially interesting characters, and answer questions introduced by the progenitor series preceding them despite taking place in the timeline's future.)
DSC could have worked from the get-go. If there were fewer sci-fi ideas being used, it would have fit in more easily for sure. I agree in that its biggest flaw is that it felt a need to be a prequel, but it's not really doing anything in the previous era that amounts to worldbuilding. It's using what later series did build, often inconsistently if not clumsily. Doesn't mean they're bad (of what I'd seen, the mirror Lorca isn't half bad and the mirror Killy Tilly is kinda cool... heck, having DSC been between TOS and TNG would alone have been better than being before TOS... But others, like Mudd, are another story and not in the good pile. )
ENT honored the prequel concept better,
It is filling gaps, though not all needed to be there. I put ENT and DSC on the same level, they don't do anything that TOS onward already explained with enough tone and content. YMMV, however.
especially in DISCO's first season. I get the strong attraction of nostalgia, but that's the issue with a lot of these reboots, sidequels, or what have you. Its like they want the glow of nostalgia but then don't want to fully embrace that nostalgia.
Only when convenient? In the Trek universe, things looked and acted in a certain way. DS9 had one episode that went to the 1701 ship and didn't take anything out of proportion. But that was season 4 DS9, set 30 years after TOS and back when Trek as a whole was more in the cultural zeitgeist. It's over 30 years since the 1990s, over 50 since TOS, and the gulf is so wide that some aesthetics are just impossible to blend in. But throwing in a ship with multiple rotating discs in its saucer.... it's like throwing a Core i7 processor into an 80286 socket. Doesn't work. DSC's corridors and bridge work fine and well, but the rotating bits just look like a future innovation. Unless the show is in its own separate timeline or realm. May as well take Freddy Krueger and tell kids he's Barney the big thick purple Dinosaur's new co-host. Now there's some genre mixing...
And I get it, they want and need space to create and add their own touch to things and not feel burdened by trying to cross every 't' and dot every 'i' to make their series fit with TOS or whatever established franchise. Also, it's less risk averse to do a prequel and the Abrams-Lin films proved there was still some interest in the TOS era.
Yeah, the corridors and bridge were just fine. At least for me, YMMV. "Black alert" is probably for solely section 31 ships and pawning all of DSC as being section 31 can adequately cover most issues, but waiting forever to reveal that just isn't going to work. It's an interesting attempt but waiting all that time. Maybe the audience just had to accept it at face value and later get told the trick. Is that the best way to do narrative storytelling, as a prequel in a franchise with a lot of lore (of which a lot trying to answer questions via prequels and such would only make more problems - VOY tried this with the Borg in spots and it failed there too, even in retconning itself.)
All that being said, from a creative standpoint, of having a Trek series truly for this era, I wish they had set DISCO after Nemesis. Almost nothing major in the series would've even needed to be changed. The main sticking point would be Burnham being Sarek's daughter and Spock's sister. Though depending on when you set the series, Michael could've still been in his adopted daughter, it would've just been the older Sarek. Or she could've been Tuvok's adopted daughter.
Sarek's adopted daughter is just fine. Sybok being Spock's half-brother also came out nowhere. But what would make the shoehorning in of Sybok comparatively successful? (STV was not a prequel, and Sybok isn't a human that bests every lasts Vulcan in their version of the SAT in some incredibly naff dialogue as faux means to generate interest... Despite how Michael being the reverse of the same trope Sybok is, which is actually an inspired one - since Sybok was a Vulcan who wanted to be more human-like so here's Michael, a human who wants to be Vulcan... which is not a bad idea by any means. But how many more siblings are there, and are they named Jan, Marcia, Cindy, Bobby, Greg, Oliver, and/or Peter? The overkill is the big issue.)
Making DISCO a prequel was the easy route. They decided to swaddled themselves in nostalgia, yet make so many changes that it failed to deliver enough on the promised nostalgia.
Trying to bring in new audiences and established ones is never easy. Nostalgia is just one small piece. Even for the most popular shows.
In some ways Picard is better at being a Trek for today, though for me the writing, story, and tonal changes are too jarring.
The story is dictionary-standard "small universe syndrome" but not bad. The tonal changes are inevitable - TMP and TWOK - TUC (save for TFF) definitely show a new tone, but they were not disagreeable so there's more to it. Noting TSFS also toned down some of TWOK's more adult themed visuals and gore was telling enough that some critics felt it all wasn't needed, or were too much, for Trek (Trek in of itself mixes genres but rarely leans so much on horror...) At the time, TFF trying to feel like "
TOS Meets
Blazing Saddles" had audiences balking as well.
More on tonal changes, they
are a tad much with the contrived and contemporary slang (which was also crap in those early season 1 TNG attempts, such as when they tried to use "Jean" instead of "Jean-Luc"... but "Jean" was attempted for one or two episodes and not the full season of "Hangin' with JL with the XB's". Never mind turnover and writer's strike and all... But I digress: Why not have everyone say they're also "real sophis" (Since "really sophisticated" has too many syllables for them to handle, I'd guess? Now get them to sit through one paragraph of Dickens' works or, better yet, one of Shakespeare's, and really watch 'em squirm...) The makers during TNG season 1 were tweaking as they went along. Which has its own pros and cons... And imagine TOS if everyone was informal and saying "groovy" and other slang in all 79 episodes. It wouldn't have had the Trimbles trembling... (contemporary fashion and hair are inevitable due to cost but at least with verbal linguistics they can make an attempt to sound like humans of a possible future and not contemporary era people chucked into the future, this isn't "The Orville" or any other parody for that matter. The most effective way to do that is surprisingly also the cheapest and easiest: Use more formality in language construct. Kirk's era did it and little 1960sisms seeped through. TNG's overdid it, probably to compensate for too much 20th centuryisms being in scripts.)
So even there, I wish they had just made DISCO the series after Nemesis, and perhaps Jean-Luc could've been the special guest star in their season 2 instead of Pike and Spock. Heck, Burnham could've been Sisko and Kassidy's daughter, and that would've more naturally tied her to an established Star Trek hero without it feeling as shoehorned in. In many ways DISCO feels more like a successor to DS9 than a prequel to TOS anyway.
At the time, I think they wanted DSC to be as a prequel but wanted to do everything of every sort all at once. It's just impossible to do. The fact they had x number of producers and showrunners doing turnover so fast also shows more turmoil than what even TNG had.
