Is it just me, or is Star Trek going the wrong way?

If anything, Discovery seasons end a lot more hopefully than the average DS9 season. Every Discovery season has a happy end, in the finale of DS9's season 2 we learn that there's a powerful enemy waiting for the Federation, season 3 ends with the revelation that changelings have infiltrated everything, at the end of season 4 our heroes suspect that the Klingon Empire is controlled by the changelings, season 5 ends with the start of the Dominion War, season 6 ends with the death of Dax and Sisko feels abandoned by the Prophets and takes a prolonged leave of absence.

I'm pretty sure each of these DS9 season finales are more devoid of hope (and better...) than any of Discovery's, but due to the fact that we know how DS9 ultimately ends well (minus the death of a ton of Cardassian civilians...) DSC is perceived as more "depressing" and "grim".

 

Because they all got obliterated. Is that the kind of optimism you're looking for?

But that basically is what happened at the end of all three seasons of Disco and the end of Picard's first season.

I don't know, while I've had my own issues with the creative decisions made with the new Trek shows, I have to say, going all the way back to Disco's first season to now, it has always felt like Star Trek to me. Star Trek has always had a bit of inherent awfulness to it which is still present in these new shows, so I really do feel like I'm reliving the good ol' days of my youth watching these shows.

And here's where I'm thinking my days of taking you seriously are reaching a middle. Star Trek has a reputation for being so progressive and pushing boundaries, but even ignoring that, by late 1990s there were plenty of TV shows with gay main characters, even some with gay lead characters. But I notice you're using the term "edge lord" unironically, so I'm thinking I'm done conversing with you.

 

Exactly so. By the 1990s Star Trek had become one of the more conservative dramas on TV. There would have been nothing groundbreaking about gay characters.

 

Has Star Trek ever been groundbreaking to be groundbreaking? We pat it on the back for doing a lot of things that were already being done on TV. One has to remember that the casting for “The Cage” was lily-white, and it was NBC that had to push Roddenberry to diversify for the second pilot, because advertisers wanted to also sell their wares to minorities because they had money too.

A lot of what we take for granted is simply Roddenberry revisionism, that was done in the 1970’s to get college kids to attend lectures he was giving.

 

It's true, Star Trek is nowhere near as progressive as its reputation makes it seem. Even in the 1960s there were shows that had non-white actors in more meaningful roles than TOS had, and contrary to The Myth, there were other interracial kisses on TV before Plato's Stepchildren. Hell, TOS itself had other interracial kisses before Plato's Stepchildren. But this whole thing some people have been latching onto here lately with "90s Trek/Berman era couldn't have gay people because that was too risky for TV at the time" really has to stop. If Star Trek really were as groundbreaking and progressive as the Myth makes it out to be, that shouldn't have been an issue. But even ignoring that, by the time we got to the midway point of Voyager gay people were very common on TV meaning there was zero risk to Star Trek if they included a gay character. By the time the Berman era ended in 2005 the supposedly progressive Trek franchise had turned into a dinosaur with its refusal to have gay people on the show.

 

I think Trek trying to finally catch up to actual progressive television and earn it's reputation has been one of the things that has jarred a lot of the crusty Fandamentalist types you see spewing the same old "Kurtzman is killing star trek!" garbage. Those people will not be placated. At the moment they are probably fervently waiting on SNW as the Great White Hope. They will be disappointed, again.

They tend to not focus on the actual weak points of this current era of star trek, which for me has been the jarring series enders for Discovery series 1, 2 and the ending of Picard season 1. Writing quality has not always been fantastic. They got it right with much of Season 1 of Picard and season 3 of Discovery, most of Short Trek and almost all of Lower Decks, however.

Taken all of streaming trek as one entity, for a moment. it's taken time for the "show" to build up speed and sort out organizational issues. I think there were some initial plans for Discovery that might have initially been dropped, only to slowly be re-realized in different ways. In that context the very dark dismal beginning of Discovery, that put so many people off, was necessary.

I still believe that if Discovery had started off with Episode 3 and done flashbacks to the Shenzhou stuff, people would have been more receptive to what came later.

 

We're much better off without them. I hope they hate Strange New Worlds with the burning passion of 1,000 suns when they find out it's not going to "Make Trek Great Again".

 

Yep. “Context is for Kings” is a great episode, I still don’t know what they were thinking with that opening two-parter...

 

IIRC, that was the plan, but the behind the scenes clusterfuck that went on during the first season saw to it that didn't happen

 

Instead we got a ponderous amount of Klingon speechmaking, a ship that was not Discovery, the usual not entirely competent Admiral who was going to die in a few minutes, Sarek who probably should have had a later introduction, etc, The first two are not BAD, just not as good. Michelle Yeoh and Doug Jones are the bright spots, while SMG's character is not really interesting or endearing enough in those two episodes to make you want to keep watching on her own.

Starting with Context would have been better. "Who is that, why is she in jail? What's this war everyone's talking about?"

 

I'd rather be on Discovery than the Enterprise D, E or DS9.

So, nu Trek for me has that and I don't see the nihilism because these shows are not representative of the Star Trek world as a whole.

And things do work out. It just isn't perfect or free of consequences.

 

IMO, "The Vulcan Hello"/"Battle at the Binary Stars" suffers from being stuck between a rock and a hard place, it's too long for establishing Burham's "crime", but nowhere near long enough to actually give us time to bond with the crew of the Shenzhou.

The way I see it, two options would have been better than what we got:

1/ Start with a teaser of footage from TVH/BatBS, then skip forward to a slightly trimmed "Context is for Kings" as the reason of the first episode.

2/ Cut the season into three relatively equal arcs (maybe 4:5:5 rather than 2:7:5), and give us time to care about the crew of the Shenzhou and show us more of the character of Burnham before the "mutiny".

YMMV which would be better.

 

My understanding was they had trouble fitting the footage into the episodes of the first half of the season, especially after CBS told them they couldn't include any such scenes in the Harry Mudd's Groundhog Day episode, because they wanted that as standalone as possible. Eventually they just decided that given there was enough content to fill two episodes, they'd use it as a two-part premiere. instead.

 

There is no nihilism anywhere in Star Trek. That's a complete misuse and misunderstanding of the term.

Fuck, even Zack Snyder doesn't do nihilism.

You want a close example of nihilism watch a flick like I Care A Lot. Even it invests a bit too much meaning in the proceedings.

 

The most nihilistic episode in the Star Trek franchise I can think of off the top of my head would be VOY's "Course: Oblivion." Some fans really like the episode, but I've always been critical of it, because a) it's a pointless sequel to one of the better and more creative VOY episodes, "Demon" (and in reply I can already hear variations of, "the pointlessness was the point, man!", to which I roll eyes, say ugh, etc.) and b) because it doesn't mesh well with the tone of the franchise. I mean, my favorite episodes tend to be the experimental ones that push the boundaries (because otherwise you tend to get the cookie cutter approach), but if I had had to edit "C: O," I would have at least made Janeway aware of the nature of the other ship, through some sensor reading and process of deduction, so that she and the cast could emote with us about the loss of the seed they had tried to plant. Instead we got... pointlessness.

 

I think nihilism and darkness get tossed around rather willy-nilly in fandom without a full understanding of what they actually mean. Star Trek has not embraced nihilism even in the darkest days of various conflicts. Even with Discovery and Picard it isn't nihilism for them to go through some pretty dark times after years of conflict. It would be nihilism if people through up their hands and go "Whelp, life sucks so why try?" In fact, the shows actively argue against that that people giving up and walking away leads to more problems not less.

Nihilism: people keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. See also dark, gritty, grim-dark, dystopia.

 

DS9 is my second-favorite Trek series and Seasons 6 and 7 are full of grim faces, disasters and death tolls that make Wolf 359 seem like a picnic. Ben Sisko basically permits a state murder to get the Romulans into the Dominion War on the side of the Federation and its other allies and says he can live with it(for the most part, I'm guessing), Nog becomes addicted to holosuites when the fantasy world of 1962 Las Vegas allows him to forget about being a wounded war veteran in the late 24th century, Jadzia is murdered in cold blood by Gul Dukat whose body is occupied by a Pah Wraith and the final hours of the Dominion War see roughly 800 million Cardassians slaughtered in planetary war crimes that are almost unrivalled in Trek canon. Yet under it all is the glimmer of hope that war can end, something approaching normalcy can be restored, friendships can endure and grow stronger and love prevails.

The Federation prevails. The Alpha Quadrant powers win. There's a lot in that Trek to see as nihilistic but in the end it wasn't, and I don't see Kurtzman Era Trek that way, either. The galaxy in the first 24 years after the end of the Dominion War is in a rebuilding phase and that's not necessarily the same thing as hopeless, nihilistic Star Trek. The bloodiest war in recorded history has left countless lives damaged and the disasters that happened in the ensuing years(the Synth attack on Mars, the destruction of Romulus) helped drive the feeling that things just aren't well in the Alpha Quadrant. But much like the years immediately following World War II there's a lot of progress being made even if we didn't see it smiling at us on the surface.

 

He can't, I don't think. I think my favorite scene in DS9 with regards to the war is him pouring out the blood wine with Martok. He can take no pleasure from the victory because he knows the cost.

Exactly this. And this is why Kurtzman Trek, for all the ups and downs, works so well for me. There is no quick fix, no easy solution, to a rebuilding society. The Federation is struggling after significant pain and somehow they are just to walk it off. How is that hopeful that after conflict it just gets treated as "*shrug* Stuff happens."

 

Maybe "people" do, but I think I have the word "nihilism" pretty well under control. I'm guessing you think you do, too, if you're telling us that "people" are using it wrongly?!

 

I have many problems with Kurtzman Trek and none of it has to do with tone or "nihilistic tendencies."