ITT: Good information on who's opinions I should ignore lol.
Seriously how in hell do people in this thread consider Sonequa Martin Green or Shazad Latif good actors? Dear god, they're absolutely awful by every objective measure, I think a rock has more natural emotional range than either and I don't mean Dwayne Johnson, I mean, an actual physical lump of mineral. SMG is an absolutely terrible actress, it's actually astonishing how laughably bad her acting and delivery is, in what universe is her acting good?
Anyway
Pro:
- Lorca, Stamets, Saru are/were interesting enough (until the writers character assassinated Lorca)
- Interior of the Klingon Sarcophagus ship had amazing craftsmanship.
- Sarek is portrayed well.
- Nice redesign on Andorians.
- Tardigrade had nice VFX
- Mudd update was nice and acted well.
- It's free on Netflix for those of us who aren't American.
Cons
Where to begin?
- The acting from SMG is god awful and she and the character of Michael Burnham drag down the entire show. It's actually so goddamn bad that there are times I struggle not to skip her character scenes especially anything to do with the absolute awful "romance" between her and Tyler.
- The writing has been extremely sub-par across the board. The entire show is written around lame mystery boxes, which are resolved with lame Nu-Who level Deus Ex making the several episode buildup "mystery" completely pointless. Character dialogue ranges from unnatural to absolutely cringeworthy. (That needs of the many romance scene, party scene etc)
- I feel the writers do not actually like Star Trek or get Star Trek at all. To me it's extremely obvious that the writers wish they could be writing their own Sci-Fi series and not Star Trek. The Star Trek "elements" for the most part feel extremely shallow and fanwanky, like they just skimmed MemAlph for 15 minutes and then just threw something they read that in an episode as a reference. (Voyager also suffered from writers who didn't want to be working on a Trek show)
- Star Trek Discovery to me actually feels more like MASS EFFECT: Discovery than Star Trek. It's extremely obvious that Mass Effect was the main inspiration at least aesthetically for the show rather than Star Trek.
- Everything about the Klingons was an abortion. I mean, there are ideas there that are cool, but they were so, so close and didn't get there and instead made everything awful. Great example is lack of hair, throw hair on those Klingons and they actually look cool.
- The Klingon ships are WTF bad.
- Pretty much all the Fed Ship designs are mediocre. I do not get the wank over the Shenzhou, it's pretty much literally Mass Effect's Normandy with a saucer, it also feels extremely out of place in the timeline feeling like a STO ship.
- We're at the last episode of the 1st season and we barely still have actually any characters. "Character development" through the season just felt hamfisted and done in service for the plot.
-They're not only working with one of the most iconic pieces of pop-culture, they're working in the era of possibly the most iconic aesthetic of pop culture and instead of actually UPDATING the TOS aesthetic, they threw it all in the trash and copy-pasted Mass Effect.
- Episodes feel extremely short. Episodes this short do not work with the pacing or storytelling they are going for. GoT episodes range from 60 minutes to 80 minutes, where Discovery at points has dropped basically to the low 30s at times.
- The space shot VFX are near video game tier.
- No diversity in main characters, aside from Saru they're all Americans.
That is just off the top of my head right now. There is a lot more that I'm missing.