You know, since it is online, DISCOVERY is not beholden to the 42 minute episode time that other shows are stuck with. So why not take advantage of that? I don't mean 45 minutes, because basically TNG, DS9, VGR, and ENT season 1. They should be full hours... really, longer than TOS, which clocks in 49-50 minutes. I feel like the platform it is on is not being fully taken advantage of here, which makes me feel cheated. We can have more small moments with the characters, more story on the bridge officers, more time for 'check this phenomenon out', and more moments of just 'wow, we are exploring new places'. Hell, DS9 had room for DOZENS of recurring characters and were confined to the 45 minute time parameter. Netflix does it with BLACK MIRROR, with numerous episodes 1 and a quarter hours long. STAR TREK: DISCOVERY should be doing this, especially since seasons are short compared to the other STAR TREK shows.
Amazingly, I actually agree with a fair amount of this, @eschaton...or at least see your point. I think the difference is that while these were viewed as considerable disappointments / irritations for you that prohibited you from enjoying the show...I enjoyed it despite these things, as they weren't total deal breakers for me and the show exceeded the sum of its parts. I've made some comments or responses to your list below. Agree...although I thought there were some pretty good examples of this in S1 to be honest. I think that, unlike most of the Trek we have gotten in the past, though, it wasn't as cleanly spelled out in a speech at the end or a chuckle on the bridge before warping out of orbit. But, I believe it's there more than you give credit for. Agree. I think the general feeling was that S1 was Burnham's arc, and a lot of the storytelling energy went into that. This is a great cast with a lot of chemistry. I think they would be well-served to leverage that. Agree that there is room for improvement here. Honestly, though, this is characteristic of all Star Trek, particularly Berman-era Trek. That's not an excuse, but it is to say that perhaps the writers still had 700 hours of those voices ringing in their heads and had trouble breaking the mold. I do think that the series got better at this as it went along, though. Entirely agree. Again, this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the first season, but it is clearly a place where there is room for enormous improvement. I am concerned about this one. While I think S2 looks great, and has the potential to be a good improvement over an already good (IMO) S1...I'm concerned about the vast number of elements that are already known to be part of S2: Spock Pike Number One Discoprise Red Angels Anomolies Tyler L'rell Moar Klingons Emperor G Section 31 Sarek Saru's home planet Talosians / Talos IV I just hope they haven't bitten off more than they can chew...and there's an integrated, cohesive plan to have all this fit appropriately.
I think the VFX were mostly good in Season 1, aside from all of the ship renderings, which were absolutely atrocious. Not just badly rendered (though they did look like an early aughts video game) but also very badly directed. For some reason the showrunners were terrified to let us have an extended look at the ships, with many of the outside shots very short and zoomed in to such a ridiculous degree that at times we couldn't see all of Discovery. Perhaps this was to hide how low-quality the renderings were, but honestly the overall effect - at least for me - was that it was worse than nothing. I'd sincerely prefer we didn't actually see the ship-to-ship combat in some cases, and just see the bridge crew doing the whole TNG fake shaking thing. But as you said, the external ship shots we have seen to date (both in the Short Treks and in the trailers) are dramatically better. Either they fired whoever was doing the work or had a talk with whoever thought it was a good idea. The majesty of Discovery is pretty clear now, which is an important part of any Trek, because the ship is a character!
I'm not saying it was entirely absent. I mean, the tardigrade arc pretty clearly was meant to harken back to Devil in the Dark. Burnham's backstory with Sarek from Lethe was interesting, and it fit thematically with the deeper understanding we got of Lorca (or rather, thought we got - since it was really his mask). But I felt like DIS's first season was a bit noncommittal. It would come close to saying something profound at times, then quickly back away to pay attention to what subtitled Klingons were muttering about or something. Yes. I feel like the cast is one of the strengths of the series. No one really bores me as was the case on ENT or VOY, and they're all excellent actors - maybe not up there with the top actors in Trek history, but overall, probably the second-best cast in terms of acting talent. Not all Berman Trek was the same though. DS9 - which I know you also enjoyed - made a conscious effort to avoid technobabble, and as a result had the most naturalistic dialogue out of the Trek series. It's also worth noting that the framing devices of Berman-era Trek - the common bridge scenes, along with the "ready room" conferences which began with TNG - helped make the exposition seem more naturalistic. People don't infodump on each other in casual conversation after hours, after all, but it's not uncommon to have presentations given in a work environment. DIS avoiding these situations meant the infodumps - where they happened, felt a lot weirder (for example, Burnham's terrible one explaining how Katras work while recovering in Sickbay. In general though, Trek has up until Discovery been structured in an almost radio play format. I know film professors have demonstrated that you can listen to only the audio of a Star Trek episode and it generally works just as well, because of the convention that (for example) bridge officers actually say out loud what they are doing rather than just quietly doing their job when given an order. Trek really only departs from this "radio play" format when it plays around with a more visual genre, like horror or suspense, which requires a good deal of storytelling be told outside of dialogue. There's other stuff you forgot. Cornwell is coming back again (for what reason, I don't know - I think they destroyed her character last season). We're going to spend time bouncing around a ridiculously dense asteroid field, meet some black tar alien thing, and get introduced to Tig Notoro's character. I think the showrunners have promised a bit more fleshing out of characters like Detmer and Airiam - hopefully just giving them actual lines. IMHO the late decision to add an episode to the season is a good thing, because it likely means they realized their ending was too complicated to try and wrap up in such an abrupt fashion as they attempted with Season 1. We will see I suppose.
I understand your concern. But Season 1 was extended relatively early in production, and the additional episodes appear to have been two in late Act 1 (Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad and Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum). The news that Discovery was being extended by a single episode came very late in production (when there was only about a month of filming left) thus it's much more likely that whatever the additional episode ends up being its tacked onto the end.
I do agree that DS9 was better, but it still had some pretty dated-sounding dialogue. To your point, it was easily the most naturalistic since TOS / TOS movies. I think this analogy to "radio plays" is pretty spot-on, though. I've never been able to put my finger on describing what always feels off about Star Trek dialogue to me. The worst example that I always point to is when the shuttle is spinning out of control in Insurrection and Worf and Picard are still explaining outloud what they are doing. Frigging awful...rips you right out of the scene every single time. Interestingly, I was going to add Cornwell...but figured that was more of a background "Necheyev-like" arrangement, and I was going to add Notoro's character but couldn't remember the frigging name of the actress!
I'd like the show to be less ugly in tone and spirit. I liked the idea of what they were trying to do in season one -- to show the light emerging from the darkness -- but I didn't think we actually saw that. The little bit of lip service to traditional Trek values tacked on at the end wasn't enough to counterbalance the Many Burdens of Burnham, especially when they wrap things up by concluding that, hey, giving a lunatic terrorist a doomsday weapon is slightly better than committing full-on genocide. That "solution" is shockingly ugly for a Trek show, especially one they've positioned right next to TOS. If there's to be so much suffering -- and I do understand its importance for dramatic purposes -- at least take the time to explore the effect on the characters. Just a few minutes of dialogue examining the effect of Culber's death on Stamets, for example, could have saved that scene from feeling like another Discovery shock twist and added real dramatic weight to the whole season. Even the "let's arm a terrorist" ending, which I so dislike, could have been interesting had someone paused to feel conflicted about it. Instead, we got a Burnham speech and a medal ceremony. It was missing the introspection I expect from good Star Trek, and I hope they remedy that for season two.
I can't really think of much that I'd require them to do. I try not to watch with a checklist in hand. That said, I'm hoping that the show, not having lost the show runner in the way it did for the first season, will be a little bit more consistent (with itself) over the run of the season. I hope it continues to surprise and entertain me, and I hope it continues to keep angering the same cast of characters. I hope that it doesn't contradict some of the more universally-loved noncanon about the TOS era from the novels, but I know that's a pipe dream. I hope that the references to TAS continue, and maybe even more fleshed out. I do hope that the Pike/Spock element doesn't wholly overshadow DSC's great original characters such as Saru and Tilly, and leaves room to learn more about the bridge crew that we heard so little from.
I am amazed at the amount of level-headedness and reasonableness in this thread. Even if there are things I don't necessarily agree with or feel the same way about...people are expressing themselves in a constructive manner that really makes me read each post and each opinion with an open mind. Shocked I tell you.....SHOCKED!!!!
The look and tone of S2, based solely on the trailers, commercials and other little snippets of info we have, strikes me more as what I always loved and wanted to see more consistently out of Star Trek...and that is basically Indiana Jones in SPAAAACCCE. Give me an epic mystery that needs to be solved as we adventure across space and various planets, meeting interesting people, solving puzzles, punching some bad guys, cracking some jokes, and having some great serious drama, tension and heavy lifting mixed in. I always loved the Indiana Jones franchise for their ability to balance charm, action, adventure, mystery, fun and seriousness all in one package...and take us all over the place while doing it. I was never a fan of the slower, more plodding Treks (TMP is an exception). I've always been more of an adventure guy than a philosopher. So, I'm hoping for balance! I had absolutely no interest in "yet another war story" from Star Trek, and was bummed when I learned what the Discovery premise was going to be. Much to my surprise (and unlike others admittedly), I actually found the show to be extremely likable, despite it not being what I wanted even from the word "go." My take on S2 is that if the premise is now something closer to what I do like (and all indications are that it is), then I will really have some fun with this next season. I agree with you on a lot of this. My biggest gripe has been that they don't have the episodes running longer. The only place I think it falls apart is comparing it to DS9 in terms of the development of multiple secondary characters. DS9 was a different animal, with nearly double the episodes per season, and 7 seasons to accomplish that. That's the equivalent of nearly 14 seasons of DSC. I think what drives it is the fact that they do broadcast it on television in Canada. So, I think they film and edit it with that thought in mind. I would prefer that the streaming versions contain longer cuts with richer backstory, and the broadcast versions get edited down as necessary...but hey...what do I know?
Honestly, given what we have seen in advancement of AI since TOS, if we were starting over with a clean sheet of paper I think it might make sense to minimize - or even skip - the whole bridge thing entirely. The basic problem of the bridge is that it's served as the focal point of most of the Trek shows, but it's boring. Fundamentally it's usually our main cast sitting/standing around, either reading technobabble/exposition off of terminals or watching video transmissions from elsewhere. Trek has tried to gussy it up in various ways. TOS tried to have a lot of shots focusing on peoples faces and eyes in high-tension scenes. TNG and the later shows utilized the "bridge shake" and exploding consoles so much it became a running joke. But it's just never as exciting as away missions. And it's never the place to go for "character focus" moments - which tend to happen in a more intimate setting like the mess hall or the captain's quarters. But what if the ship more or less ran itself, and the crew were basically passengers between destinations? This would allow for more time to concentrate on what is important/interesting in Trek - the characters, the adventures, and the stories - and less time dealing with the done-to-death scenes with the characters furiously pressing buttons while telling us aloud exactly what they're doing.
My fave example of season one dialogue was when Burnham starts describing those in the room as if she's a voiceover narrator - "and you, the prideful Andorian; and that guy, the irritating Tellarite; and him, the traditionalist Klingon, all have now shown me the true meaning of Life Day."
The exact quote is: My eyes were rolling so hard then. Any other Trek series would have just said "Why have all of you made common cause despite your differences?"
A Klingon, whose pride of honor is eternally fused with his identity as a warrior, stands side by side with a Vulcan, who cannot possibly comprehend his need for aggressive emotional expression. And a willful Andorian looks to you not with hostility, but with allegiance. I like it.
It would be even more interesting if They brought Nora into the storyline from "Calypso" as the "MIND" of the Enterprise. Only at this point she'd be very basic as compared to how we see Her in that short. Be cool to watch her develop slowly through the seasons toward what she is to become 1000 years later.