Fuller was the one responsible for the anthology idea (that probably necessitated building the sets to be more “any era”), making Klingons alien aliens, etc., and the productions have been walking all of his stuff back ever since.
I still kinda wish they had went with the anthology idea. If they were going to walk back the stuff anyway, why not just write off the first season as its own thing? I believe the official reason they had to give up on the anthology idea was that costs were prohibitive to rebuild sets and bring in new actors year over year, especially after they had to spend extra money course correcting after Fuller's departure.
From what's been revealed and said, Fuller's entire plan was centered around the Mirror Universe, but a re-imagining of the Mirror Universe where instead of it being a place of more malevolent alter-egos of the characters, the Mirror Universe would be more a road-not-taken place of bad choices and mistakes. And that would connect thematically to Michael's bad choice at the Battle of the Binary Stars.
FULLER: "The thing that really fascinated me in sitting down and crafting the story for Discovery was the human condition. I thought that there are elements in the Mirror Universe that we have seen that have sort of boiled to the broadest ends of the spectrum and everything felt really binary. And what I really wanted to do in setting out was looking at the minutiae of simple decisions that have a cascade effect on our lives. So, it’s not about gold lamé sashes and goatees versus no sash and clean-shaven. It is more about we are at forks in the road every moment of our lives and we either go left or right.
It makes me think of Joe Menosky’s speech in [VOY “Latent Image”], where The Doctor has a Sophie’s choice, he can only save one life. And he chose Ensign Harry Kim versus this other ensign and it is a split-decision and it causes his entire program to unravel because he can’t handle how his choice was always going to cost a life. It was his Kobayashi Maru.
So, there was something in the mistakes made by Burnham in “Battle of the Binary Stars” that had this ripple, but the Mirror Universe was always meant to be an exploration of a small step in a different direction. So, it wasn’t necessarily the Mirror Universe we know from all of the other series. It was something that was closer to our timeline and experience, so you can still recognize the human being and go, “What did I do? How did that seem like a good decision for me in that moment and how do I continue with my life forward?” And everything was a sort of an extrapolation out on that. So, there were things that I wanted the Mirror Universe to function in a narrative exploration of like “Oh fuck, if I just didn’t do that one thing, everything would be better.” As opposed to, “I don’t recognize that person, I don’t know who that person is, because they are a diametric opposite of who I am.”
In the
Discovery season 1 that we got, I thought they missed an opportunity with how they concluded the Mirror Universe arc. Instead of returning to the Federation losing the war with the Klingons, I thought it would have been more interesting if they had gone timey-wimey with it, and had the Spore Drive spit them out
before the Battle of the Binary Stars. And the conclusion of the season would be them having to decide whether to intervene to stop the war before it ever began, and save Captain Georgiou. That they would redeem Michael by basically hitting a reset button, and then season 2 would start in a new timeline.
You want the final frontier to have a "new beginning"? Don't have it be made by the people who ran it into the ground over the past decade-plus, wanted a break, and were tapped out.
I think you're absolutely right about Berman and Braga, and it shows in seasons 1 and 2 of ENT. But I think when people speak about ENT being "good," they're almost always talking about seasons 3 and 4, where I think you could argue that Manny Coto had made it somewhat of an entirely different show.
I remember thinking that Scott Bakula was totally wrong for Archer during the first 2 seasons, especially when they giving him stuff like the "Gazelle Speech" to say and spent a good part of the first season making him pout about the Vulcans. But I thought in seasons 3 and 4 they found the right tone for the character where I bought him as someone who's a good leader.
