Spoilers Alright, here's one question.

[cultcross]

Maybe I‘m misunderstanding you, but the finale does indeed establish that it was Michael visiting herself when she was injured in ”Brother“, not her mother.

Ah, my bad. I missed that. In that case the plan to capture the angel makes even less sense than before, does it not?

 

[Rhodan]

Ah, my bad. I missed that. In that case the plan to capture the angel makes even less sense than before, does it not?

The show needs to work on it´s writing in general, but really, it seems to be much better when it´s concentrating on individual episode´s plots, not on the serialized arcs.

 

[Spaceship Jo]

Throughout most of Star Trek's history, it was a presentation of short stories. Short stories, according to many, are the best form of fiction to present ideas. one of my favorite science fiction authors Brian Stableford, wrote that he always had trouble with short stories because he found that anything short he wrote tended to turn into an essay or a lecture.

So yes, I won't argue that in past Star Trek series, each story tended to be an essay or a lecture with people attached to it. But it was the relationships between those people and their characters themselves that took those essays or lectures and made them into stories. Because without those people, there is no story.

Around 1960, a change came to literary science fiction, The New Wave, which also accompanied a change from the short story being dominant in the genre to novels being dominant and soft science fiction taking over, featuring less emphasis on the particular problem that was to be debated and more on the people living the debate.

These novels still included plenty of scifi ideas, but they were less about debate on the idea than the people living in consequence of them than there being a lesson strategy involved. Some of my favorites of the era include Roger Zelazny's The Dream Master, Samuel DeLany's Nova and John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

People looking for the kind of lesson's didactic science fiction provided in those stories would be sorely disappointed because they weren't lectures or essays, but stories about people in a science fiction setting and not science fiction ideas with archtypes hung on them, but were still science fiction stories.

Star Trek in the past has been presented as a pre-new wave construction of science fiction. It was about ideas with the available archtypes to hang on them. Discovery isn't that kind of science fiction series. It is more of a New Wave take on Star Trek which is a story about people in a science fiction setting. Science fiction ideas are still there, but they are not what Discovery revolved around as its mainstay.

So, no, Discovery isn't about providing didactic stories that offer you a lecture or present an essay on the idea of the week. But again, IMO, it is still very much science fiction, just a science fiction which was invented in the 1960s, not one who's heyday was in the 1940s and 1950s. And searching for that didactic fiction in Discovery is going to be as hard as it would be to find it in Norm Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron or JG Ballard's Vermillion Sands, because the writers are not treating their forum as a classroom to lecture kids on the topic of the day.

I honestly recall the kinds of complaints in reviews of New Wave Science Fiction by oldschool SF critics saying "what the hell is this, this isn't science fiction" but, at least in literary circles science fiction has been what Discovery is for longer than Star Trek has been on the air. And IMO, its about time Trek moved past the 1950s, at least before we actually get to the 2050s.

And honestly, continuing to use the term Soap Opera as a derogatory complaint about anything that isn't lecture first and character second is getting pretty creaky in its old age, as is most viewers who still remember what a soap opera is, Good heavens, The big complaint about Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine back in the days was that they were 'Soap Operas' in space. Even creaky old Marina Sirtis recently chimed in that DS9 wasn't really Star Trek because it was a "hotel in space". This antique opinion was off point then, and still is.

You bring up several wonderful points, yet none actually responds to the issue at hand. Indeed, just because forms of popular storytelling change, that does not make them bad, but it also does not make them intrinsically good.

The examples you mention are not at all like DSC, as they have functional narrative structures, and DSC does not.

You think I mean something by Soap Opera that I do not. My description is acedemic, not judgmental. Character focus is not a problem. In fact it's one of DSC's many strengths. Lack of functional narrative is likewise not a problem, just a fact.

This particular thread is about the time travel element of S2. And sure, you can make a kind of sense out of the plot. The way other treks used warp to get to stories, DSC uses plot to get to emotional moments. That's its MO, that's it. So trying to make sense of the time travel element that was a means to an end and not built as a story, why?

If you really think it's fair game to discuss the quality of DSC's storytelling in the broader sci-fi context, then it basically sucks. The narrative is a hot mess of arbitrary elements that are so poorly set up, any of them could be interchanged without impacting the meat and potatoes of those crucial emotional beats.

But DSC doesn't suck. Not at all. So why measure it by yardsticks that fail it?

 

[Amasov]

The narrative is a hot mess of arbitrary elements that are so poorly set up, any of them could be interchanged without impacting the meat and potatoes of those crucial emotional beats.

But DSC doesn't suck. Not at all. So why measure it by yardsticks that fail it?

Yup, you hit it exactly. And I found a lot of this from the moment Control was introduced halfway into the season.

 

[XCV330]

Ah, my bad. I missed that. In that case the plan to capture the angel makes even less sense than before, does it not?

Things like this are signs repeatedly that the backroom upheavals did not help the show. They might have done well to avoid too much serialization while they went through those changes. I know Paradise is putting a good face on it. She should. And she's doing well, for inheriting what might have been a mess. I loved season 2, but these logic and continuity problems that show up repeatedly later in the season could have been dealt with. It's the same kind of writing problems that plagued Capaldi era Doctor Who. They clearly care about the show they are making. they put in a lot of effort and they know as much about the lore as most fans, but herding all that into one cohesive thing, its not an easy job i am sure.

They may have reached too high with this complicated a plot. If they can focus on less twists and just let the writers, who really are talented, write the stories they want tell, they can still have an arc narrative that doesn't have to look like a Gordian knot on a flowchart.