Spoilers Re-watching Season 1 & trying to guess where Seasons 3, 4, 5 go

I agree, except Kurtzman has made some sort of comment along the lines of "all will be explained" about why Micheal is never mentioned by Spock. Meaning he's planning for some sort of dramatic disjuncture by the end of the season.

 

Your Logic is ruining the conversation for some of the folks around here.
Would you please cut it out.
<snicker>

 

And the series didn't start off by Kirk saying "This reminds me of the time me and my brother, did I mention I had a brother? we're waiting on my dad who is a starfleet officer to come home. This was before my brother went away for awhile and I got stuck with mom on Tarsus IV. I swear, I've traveled some much I sometimes forget my middle initial"

 

I suspect Burnham may be captain for season 3 or 4.

I also expect various other TOS characters will appear - McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu etc either for short arcs or entire seasons. Since we never got "first meetings" in TOS (only the explicitly alternate Kelvin universe), they'll put them all in Disco. And hopefully explore their versions of the characters in more depth.

 

... and that would of course, have eased the groundswell of complaints.

Not?

 

Hope not. Saru probably has put in a lot of time as XO. Maybe not as much as Burnham (not sure how long she was first officer on Shenzou. It was mentioned in the first episode last year), but he's a battle tested commander, now.

 

Though I've yet to see anything in the plot that required Spock have a foster sister.

 

I'm not sure Saru has the chops or desire to be a captain. But, we shall see.

 

If that happens, the gang is splitting up no?

I'd honestly love if we had a series which just followed a main character through their promotions onto different ships, all the way from Ensign to Captain. I don't see that ever happening though.

 

Then we'd have endless complaints about how the show is far too focused on one character--the only one who is in each season. (I'd have no problem with that, mind, but there's already a torrent of complaints about Burnham on this point--unfounded, in my view, but there nonetheless).

 

Yeah, I realize that. And this is an issue all shows have. Witness the issues that - in an entirely different genre - high-school focused shows have when popular characters reach the age of graduation and the writers don't want to write them off the show, so they come up with some story-like which inexplicably makes them the sort of losers who never move way from mom's house.

But if Starfleet is the sort of quasi-military operation it seems to be, they should have regular crew rotations. This is entirely normal in the armed forces because they want first loyalty to be to the force, not to a commanding officer or your comrades onboard.

 

Agreed. And I'd watch such a show. The need for keeping an audience that loves its characters, though, makes this a fantasy, however, unless someone with LOTS of money decided to produce such a thing for streaming and didn't care about losing money on it (like many billionaires who own sports teams).

 

A factor in not "evolving" these shows is the "If-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it" syndrome - that is, in the fortunate circumstance that a show and its characters are embraced by a reliable and profitable audience, the commercial incentive is to keep things as they are. It requires both very confident producers and strong support from the studio and presenting service to really push a narrative into new areas with new characters. The more expensive and risky a project is, the less likely it is to evolve if it is successful as it is.

Which makes me a bit curious as to how they'll handle Pike. The guy's got an expiration date on him, I'd think - gone at the end of the year - but if he somehow stands out near the end of that time as having become important the show's appeal then CBS might not want to let Mount get away. I suspect that the return of the Cannibal Queen and the upcoming Section 31 project have a lot less to do with any creative vision on the part of the producers than they do the belated appreciation of how enormously popular Yeoh was with the viewers, and the need to come up with some appropriate storyline to keep her character going some way, any way. Her reincarnation as Emperor Georgiou itself may have represented the first dawning of that realization last year, as it was clearly improvised later in the season's development.

 

you know after rewatching Discovery season 1, I wish they would've said "Hey this is a new timeline after all". The one thing i loved about the Kelvin Timeline is that they had the freedom to go wherever they felt like and tell new stories. By placing this in the "prime timeline" they basically shot themselves in the foot because they are so restricted by the stories they can tell.

 

Are they? Sure, there ARE restrictions as in "we know what happens 5 years down the road on a different ship in another corner of the quadrant", but DS9 had a very similar restriction and found a way to tell a compelling 7 year long story.
DISCO has a chance to tell stories that don't happen anywhere near the Enterprise's 5YM but canonical make sense. We know the Cardassians are just around the corner, DISCO could keep up with them or use some of the hundreds of Aliens-of-the-week and develop them in season long arcs further. The imagination of the writers is the only real limit they have.