To me,
Star Trek is summed up in two documents. First, this exchange from "All Good Things...":
Q: You just don't get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.
PICARD: When I realised the paradox.
Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence.
Second, this passage from the
Star Trek Writer's Bible 1967:
CAN YOU FIND THE MAJOR STAR TREK ERROR IN THE FOLLOWING "TEASER" FROM A STORY OUTLINE?
The scene is the Bridge of the U.S.S. (United States Spaceship) Enterprise. Captain Kirk is at his command position, his lovely but highly efficient female Yeoman at his side. Suddenly and without provocation, our Starship is attacked by an alien space vessel. We try to warn the alien vessel off, but it ignores us and begins loosening bolts of photon energy-plasma at us. The alien vessel's attack begins to weaken our deflectors. Mister Spock reports to Captain Kirk that the next enemy bolt will probably break through and destroy the Enterprise. At this moment we look up to see that final energy-plasma bolt heading for us. There may be only four or five seconds of life left. Kirk puts his arms about his lovely Yeoman, comforting and embracing her as they wait for what seems certain death. FADE OUT. (END TEASER)
PLEASE CHECK ONE:
( ) Inaccurate terminology. The Enterprise is more correctly an international vessel, the United Spaceship Enterprise.
( ) Scientifically incorrect. Energy-plasma bolts could not be photon in nature.
( ) Unbelievable. The Captain would not hug pretty Yeoman on the Bridge of his vessel.
( ) Concept weak. This whole story opening reeks too much of "space pirate" or similar bad science fiction.
NO, WE'RE NOT JOKING. THE PRECEDING PAGE WAS A VERY REAL AND IMPORTANT TEST OF YOUR APPROACH TO SCIENCE FICTION. HERE'S WHY.
( ) Inaccurate terminology. Wrong, if you checked this one. Sure, the term United States Space- ship" was incorrect, but it could have been fixed with a pencil slash. Although we do want directors, writer, actors and others to use proper terminology, this error was certainly far from being the major STAR TREK format error.
( ) Scientifically inaccurate. Wrong again; beware if you checked this one. Although we do want to be scientifically accurate, we've found that selection of this item usually indicates a preoccupation with science and gadgetry over people and story.
( ) Concept weak. Wrong again. It is, in fact, much like the opening of one of our best episodes of last year. “Aliens", "enemy vessels", "sudden attack" and such things can range from "Buck Rogers" to classical literature, all depending on how it is handled (witness H. G. Wells' novels, Forrester's sea stories, and so on.)
UNDERSTANDING THE RIGHT ANSWER TO THIS IS BASIC TO UNDERSTANDING THE STAR TREK FORMAT. THIS WAS THE CORRECT ANSWER:
( x ) Unbelievable. Why the correct answer? Simply because we've learned during a full season of making visual science fiction that believability of characters, their actions and reactions, is our greatest need and is the most important angle factor. Let's explore that briefly on the next page.
NOW, TRY AGAIN. SAME BASIC STORY SITUATION, BUT AGAINST ANOTHER BACKGROUND.
The time is today. We're in Viet Nam waters aboard the navy cruiser U.S.S. Detroit. Suddenly an enemy gunboat heads for us, our guns are unable to stop it, and we realize it's a suicide attack with an atomic warhead. Total destruction of our vessel and of all aboard appears probable. Would Captain E. L. Henderson, presently commanding the U.S.S. Detroit, turn and hug a comely female WAVE who happened to be on the ship's bridge?
As simple as that. This is our standard test that has led to STAR TREK believability. (It also suggests much of what has been wrong in filmed sf of the past.)
No, Captain Henderson wouldn't! Not if he's the kind of Captain we hope is commanding any naval vessel of ours. Nor would our Captain Kirk hug a female crewman in a moment of danger, not if he's to remain believable. (Some might prefer Henderson were somewhere making love rather than shelling Asiatic ports, but that's a whole different story for a whole different network. Probably BBC.)
AND SO, IN EVERY SCENE OF OUR STAR TREK STORY...
... translate it into a real life situation. Or, sometimes as useful, try it in your mind as a scene in GUNSMOKE, NAKED CITY, or some similar show. Would you believe the people and the scene if it happened there?
IF YOU'RE ONE OF THOSE WHO ANSWERS: "THE CHARACTER ACTS THAT WAY BECAUSE IT'S SCIENCE FICTION", DON'T CALL US, WE'LL CALL YOU.
Now, is
Discovery part of the
Star Trek canon? Yes, absolutely. It is a television show released under the
Star Trek name by the current copyright holder of
Star Trek. In every legal and practical sense of the term,
Discovery is
Star Trek.
However, I think
Discovery is not a spiritual successor to
Star Trek. It is like a different show using the same name.
It isn't charting the unknown possibilities of human existence through exploration of the galaxy. It's just... not. The first fifteen minutes -- which were wonderful, by the way -- were
very much in the tradition of
Star Trek. And then it went off the rails and never came back. You can make a strained argument that there was a
kind of interior and exterior exploration going on in the War Arc or the Mirror Arc, but then you look back at even the
awful first season of
Next Gen or
Voyager and see that the crews back then were constantly reaching for the stars -- even though it did so
very, very badly much of the time -- in a way that
Discovery never seriously tried to do. "Hide and Q" and "Parallax" were unwatchable garbage, but they were, spiritually,
Star Trek -- even though it was really bad
Star Trek. (There were also some mediocre shots like "Jetrel" and "The Arsenal of Freedom," too.) There's nothing in DISCO (after the opening fifteen minutes) that approaches that level of engagement with the
Star Trek mission.
Even when DISCO is at its very most watchable best (by which I obviously mean "the middle of 'Into The Forest I Go'"), it isn't being "good
Trek"; it's being "good
Battlestar spinoff." Which can be good! But isn't, to me,
Star Trek in any sense but the legal.
Even DS9 (whose first couple seasons are fine, not bad at all) is constantly bringing in new ideas, new ways of thinking about our humanity, even though the format means the exploration has to come to the station rather than the other way around. And, yes, many of them fail. For every decent "Captive Pursuit" there's an "If Wishes Were Horses." But, again, even DS9 is
trying to do something that DISCO simply has no interest in: expanding the mind and horizons of its audience by using space exploration to examine the human condition.
And then we come to the other thing that makes
Star Trek what it is: its realistic depiction of characters. What the writer's bible calls the "believability" of
Trek's characters, even in the face of a radically altered future. (The bible comes back to hammer this point home again and again and again later on.) We spend 95% of our time on this forum arguing about stuff that is ultimately a sideshow -- continuity, scientific accuracy, plot tropes -- all of which the writer's bible considers important but not central. The central thing is that the characters act like realistic people, not acting strangely because of the demands of the plot or "because it's science fiction" or "because twist reveals are trendy right now."
YMMV, of course, but I think almost everyone on DISCO this year acted like an insane person. Burnham's mutiny, which formed the basis of the whole series, was insane. Lorca's plan to... whatever Lorca's plan was... was insane. Tyler/Voq's plan was insane. Sarek acted insane several times. Mudd was insane. Admiral Cornwall was insane. Saru was doing fine but was then given an entire episode for the sole purpose of making him freely choose to act insane. Stamets, the guy who spent several episodes on a mushroom high, acted saner than everyone else on his senior staff. Tilly's great and she should be the new captain and sole returning character. Their characters were subverted in order to advance the particular plot the producers wanted to run, and their insane actions were justified largely as, "Well, it's 2018, and this is just how TV works nowadays."
That may be the case, but a show that sacrifices plausibility for spectacle has missed the essential distinguishing feature of
Star Trek, and regressed back to the days of early SF, when SF was treated as its own kind of literature where the rules of ordinary drama did not need to be followed.
For these reasons, I think
Discovery is not a spiritual successor to
Star Trek. They can namedrop as many names as they want, but they've missed the soul. I hope they do accomplish what they've set out to accomplish, and maybe that thing will eventually be good overall -- but, at least right now, they're not trying to make a
Star Trek series, and so it can never be good
Trek.
