‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Renewed for Fifth and Final Season

[The Wormhole]

I don't know if it's in this title or the other one, but someone said that the ending of Discovery was open-ended. I don't agree with that, they shot the best ending with the means they had and it was closed.

"Open ended" in the sense that since the epilogue scene takes place thirty years later, if anyone wanted to go back and do more Disco that takes place immediately after the events of S5's storyline they could and have thirty years to insert any kind of adventures in. And indeed, based on the finale's epilogue, the only things they need to be mindful of is that thirty years later Michael, Book, Tilly and Admiral Vance are still alive and Disco itself is still around. Otherwise, they have as blank a slate as they would had they been doing a sixth season or whatever.

Granted, aside from the Academy series we're probably not going to see too much in this time period in the near future. Another season of Disco isn't happening, a Disco telemovie likely won't happen given Section 31's tepid response has likely put a pause on any future telemovies. Even the novels might be under instruction not to do any Disco stories in this time period so as not to interfere with any plans the Academy series might have. Not that there's very many Trek novels these days anyway.

 

[Ssosmcin]

TOS Season 1 is the best season of TOS by far, but if you watch in production order, you can clearly see they're figuring shit out as they go along. The transition to recognizable TOS started when Gene Coon came on with Episode 12 (Miri) which is the first time we see Kirk/Spock/McCoy leading an away mission, and the other characters falling into the background.

Early Season 1, in contrast, was kind of a mess. Some episodes were proto-ensemble based, with characters like Uhura getting more to do than they had for the remainder of the show. Others were basically "The Adventures of Captain Kirk." Worldbuilding was extremely inconsistent with later Star Trek. They clearly didn't know what they were doing, and were just feeling around for a way to do an anthology sci-fi show on standing sets/with a constant cast.

That's not to say that it was all bad - Charlie X is one of my favorite TOS episodes, for example. That said, given the extreme length of seasons in 1966, they had the equivalent of an entire modern season of television to sort of fumble around into a formula that worked well.

Star Trek worked right out of the gate. A weekly episodic 60's TV series wasn't worried about "worldbuilding." It was about making quality stories and then seeing what happens is that it falls into a formula. And that's what happened. Star Trek became a formula show. Gene Coon introduced some great concepts that stuck are are still with us. But if they were really concerned about worldbuilding Roddenberry would have sat down and created the background before he started.

In a real sense, Star Trek was supposed to be "The Adventures of Captain Kirk." That's what they set out to do. Reading the internal memos regarding story drafts makes it clear that stories had to present a problem for Kirk.

By comparison, TNG didn't know what it was doing when it started. They were gun shy about being too different from TOS so they made it too much like it. And, boy it was awful. But once it decided to be its own thing, it soared. if you want real worldbuilding, then TNG is when that stuff really started.

Most shows, especially in the pre-arc driven days of TV, were exactly like that. They created a premise, did a pilot and initial episodes were merely based off what that pilot provided. Over the weeks and months, the show would settle into the formula as they see what worked and what the audiences responded to. Hence Dr. Smith and Fonzie becoming leads in series not intended for them to headline. Of the Seaview encountering monsters every week instead of spies.

I love pre-Gene Coon Trek. It's exciting, varied and unpredictable. Gene Coon brought stability and consistency. The second season was the most confident Trek I've ever seen. It's also predictable in a lot of ways, with story beats being repeated and a feeling of safety. Some of my favorite episodes are in there, but so are some of the least imaginative.

 

[Noname Given]

...By comparison, TNG didn't know what it was doing when it started. They were gun shy about being too different from TOS so they made it too much like it. And, boy it was awful..

As a TOS fan who saw the TOS 3rd season on NBC - the above is just plain incorrect. The problem with TNG was that it started out VERY differently from TOS and was nothing like it.

The problem was GR. He attempted to make it more 'evolved' with Earth being a supposed utopia, and the new characters being 'more emotionally evolved' and thus making them unrelateable to audiences. And GR confused to show how clueless he was to this when they tried to blatantly insert the McCoy/Spock dynamic with the female Dr. McCoy copy character Katherine Pulaski (even down to distrusting Transporters); but yeah it didn't work because Data was not a clone of the Spock character (It wasn't in character to 'quip back' - and Pulaski's treatment came across as open abuse.)

Yes, by it's 3rd season TNG found it's own 'voice' but no, it WAS NEVER like TOS, and that IMO was one of its major issues because GR didn't EVER want it to be.

GR's.hope was that TNG would repkace/supplant TOS entirely and fans would forget about it as he got no money from TOS but his new deal in 1987 gave him a HUGE chunk of money from all TNG merch.

 

[Dukhat]

Early TNG was extremely similar to TOS. The uniform colors, the episodic format, the constant callbacks to TOS etc., even the way the Enterprise-D would pan from left to right across the screen when in orbit of a planet exactly the way the TOS Enterprise did. Many of the same people from TOS were hired to produce the show. And what Gene wanted in terms of his characters not being emotionally involved (i.e. that death was not something to mourn over) rarely if ever came across in the finished product. If anything, TNG was much more of a snub toward the TOS movies post-TMP, since Gene hated them and felt they were far too militaristic in nature. Which is also why he put a stop to the FASA rpgs at the time (aside from the fact that he wasn’t making any money off of them.)