I'm afraid everything pre-2030 will be cancelled by the mid-21st century. What might today be considered progressive will be deemed off-limits by the presentism-orientated AI in charge of content creation & management.
I mean, we know from episodes like "The Neutral Zone" that the denizens of the 24th Century do widely regard 20th and 21st Century humans as barbaric and their values as inferior.
Same with tolerance. They talk a good game, but if you don't think the way you're "supposed to" think, tolerance is the opposite of what happens.
I mean, every happy asshole is tolerant. The question is,
of what are you tolerant? That's where the conflict comes into play. Some people are tolerant of things that others view as fundamentally unacceptable.
This is why the STAR TREK franchise is better than Marvel. (Or more to the point, Disney.)
With Marvel, everything is so interconnected that it becomes a chore to watch instead of just enjoying what you watch.
Meh. The interconnectedness of the MCU is deeply over-stated. Most of the MCU films and shows are designed to work just fine without the other stuff. I mean, is it
really that plausible that Pete and company would have a fun romp of an adventure in
Spider-Man: Far From Home so soon after the one-two punch of the Blip and the death of Tony Stark? No, it's not. But that's not the story
Far From Home wanted to tell, so they found ways to handwave away the emotional consequences of
Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame (even as later stuff like
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier dealt with that stuff head-on).
The mycelial network shouldn't exist at all.
I'm fine with the mycelial network, but I think it was a fundamental mistake to set the first two seasons of DIS in the 2250s. They found plot devices to rationalize it away, but having Starfleet discover a super-FTL like the mycelial network just really badly undermines the verisimilitude of the premise of VOY set a hundred twenty years later. And while I think the Sarek/Spock/Michael family drama worked fine, Spock and Sarek feel in DIS like fundamentally different characters to me than they do in TOS.
Really, if DIS had been set in, say, the 2390s, then it would have worked just fine. Michael's parents could have been killed in a Klingon raid during the Federation/Klingon War of DS9's 4th and 5th seasons. T'Kuvma could have been leading an anti-Federation reactionary movement in response to twenty years of Martok's Federation-friendly rule. The same basic story could have been told with the Klingon War. And the mycelial network could have been developed in response to
Voyager's journey and the tech they found.
Of course, if they had done that, we couldn't have gotten Anson Mount as Pike in S2 or SNW, so... *shrugs*
I would argue DISCOVERY has yet to hit any of the highs the previous shows have... it's one of the reasons why it doesn't grab me like most of the other shows do. I'm not saying DISCO doesn't have good episodes. There are multiple really, really good ones. Unfortunately, except for "Lethe" and "Project Daedalus", I can't tell you which ones they are because all the episodes just blur together due to the season spanning arcs.
For whatever it's worth, I think "The Vulcan Hello/Battle at the Binary Stars," "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," "People of Earth," and, especially, "Forget Me Not," are some of the greatest episodes of ST ever produced.
First, ENT has more sense of wonder and excitement by the crew, at least in the first two seasons, than DISCO.
To be honest, I think the crew of the NX-01 often came across like they were bored of their jobs and didn't really want to be there anymore (because they were being written by guys who had been doing ST for 15-20 years at that point and were creatively burnt out).
PICARD certainly doesn't have that.
Well, PIC isn't about that. It's a show preoccupied with entirely different thematic concerns. Saying PIC doesn't have a sense of wonder and excitement is a little bit like saying that
The Godfather doesn't have a sense of playful romance or that
Love Actually doesn't have a sense of tragic nihilism.
Second, the arcs on ENT were better executed. The Xindi arc did go on a bit long, but it worked overall, and they actually stuck the landing. DISCO has been doing season arcs for 4 years, and only the last one mostly stuck the landing. And the season 4 miniarcs on ENT were a perfect format... DISCO could learn from this. Tell the story in 3, 4 episodes and move on... don't have enough story for 6 episodes and drag things out for 6 more only to try a mad dash at the end for closure. PICARD is even worse at this.
Third, characters drive me, too. It's why DS9 has been and still is my favorite show in the franchise. I don't feel really drawn to most of these characters, not in the same way I do with other shows. It's certainly not the actors, because I like the casting choices and they do a damn good job with what they are given. But the writing feels rather... hollow. I don't have another word to describe how I feel. It's almost like boxes are being checked just for the sake of doing it instead of having it happen more organically. Boxes like childhood trauma: check. A lover turns out bad: check.
I do agree with your critique of the serialization structure. I think what has happened is, the combination of strong serialization and shorter seasons creates a situation where it is harder to do deep dives into the characters that take them out of the immediate circumstances of the arc. One of my favorite scenes in DIS S4 was the scene with Michael and Saru getting their anxiety out together by yelling -- it was a lovely scene of two friends having a ridiculous, loving moment together... but it was shoe-horned into the middle of this episode where there's supposed to be this dire emergency driving the situation. There ends up being a problem with pacing and tone as a result, even though the scene was, by itself, wonderful.
I think DIS would be better served by using the semi-serialized structure of DS9 or the mini-arc structure of ENT S4 -- a mix of standalones and arcs that would give the writers the opportunity to explore the characters in ways that are more tonally appropriate and that don't hurt plot pacing as much.
While ENTERPRISE did basically forget 2 of their leads,
The ones who were played by actors who weren't white, I might note.
And I definitely don't see shades of Sisko or Kirk in Burnham. The maverick side of Kirk in Burnham, perhaps. But with Kirk and Sisko... it felt like they earned the command and loyalty of the crew.
Honestly, I think I see Michael as having done more to earn her crew's loyalty than Kirk. We've seen every step of her journey from an absolute pariah to someone the crew trusts with their lives. We never saw Kirk really earn his crew's trust -- he already had it in his first episode.
Burnham seemed to get too many scenes and episodes where she's getting a pat on the back from everyone on the ship and confiding so much with the whole crew. Kirk had Bones and Spock... Sisko had Jadzia. A leader should have a confidant, but not the whole damn crew.
I don't see that at all. Michael's clear confidante is Saru, and vice versa when he was captain.
Weird: I was just thinking of commenting on Troi's adoption of a standard-issue Starfleet uniform.
Some people believe that change to be "great" or even "cool", but I thoroughly detest that alteration; it's an unfortunate bit of military conformity in a future - and a society - that doesn't neatly align with twentieth/twenty-first century military conventions.
But the entire point of a uniform is that it promotes a feeling of unity and facilitates the function of the chain of command. Why
wouldn't that still be a thing?
And are you forgetting that her mistake was attempted mutiny, not her strategy she was trying to implement?
No, it was both. She killed the Torchbearer and thereby fulfilled T'Kuvma's bigoted assertions about Federation aggression lying underneath its nominal claims to diplomacy.
Because that worked with the Vulcans, and almost certainly would have worked there.
The entire point of that part of "The Vulcan Hello"/"Battle at the Binary Stars" was that she was deeply, deeply
wrong as a result of the trauma inflicted upon her by Klingon raiders as a child.
