What was your impression of Season 2 overall?

My problem isn't so much with them going into the future; my problem is what it took to get them there and the unbelievably blatant plot holes that were big enough to fit the Discovery, itself, through. I'm not trying to suggest that writing for TV, or at all, is easy, but I don't get how these were all missed. Or, here's a worse thought; were they there and the writers didn't care?

 

IMHO the only real self-inflicted canon issues caused by Discovery is the showrunners' repeated desires to "go epic" - raising the stakes to these giant season-long stories that threaten the entire federation/galaxy/multiverse. It's completely understandable Spock never told anyone he had a foster sister - since he never told anyone he had a half brother either. But things like the Klingon War, the Spore Drive, the openness of Section 31 in the 23rd century, etc are all much, much harder to square away as having never been mentioned again onscreen.

I mean, let's look at how TOS worked. TOS wasn't really an "epic" show. The Enterprise was an important ship, but never clearly shown to be a flagship. When Kirk tangled with the Klingons or Romulans, it was with captains and commanders - people similar to himself in rank - not heads of empires. The crises of the week were almost always limited to a single solar system. We never saw Earth in the 23rd century, although it was occasionally threatened by temporal paradox or other means. This is part of what made the galaxy in TOS feel like such a big wide open space - our characters were small fish in a big pool.

While serialized story structure precludes doing exactly this, Discovery could have avoided much of its issues with canon if they just made the ship and crew less special/integral to the entire survival of the Federation. But instead it feels like they just want to tell comic book stories in a Trek format.

 

But I thought she only had juice for 1 jump. Which is why Disco went with her.

 

Thats all they had on hand yes, chances are good they will be able to get more in the future, I dont think we have seen the last of that suit.

Plus Georgiou will need a way to go back for the S31 show, as we saw in the last episode the suit is needed to open the door but anything and anyone can then go through it.

I dont think Control is as dead as we are being told either, we also dont know the status of the future AI that triggered it all by sending the probe back in time in the first place.

 

The spore drive I get but the rest not as much.

 

The Klingon War was totally ridiculous. I mean, it wasn't a minor skirmish. A goodly proportion of the Federation was occupied, a Klingon Fleet had entered the solar system, and Earth was minutes away from orbital bombardment. Yet it was never once mentioned on TOS (only ten years later) and something Martok said in DS9 IIRC directly contradicted it. Plus of course Michael is both "responsible" for the beginning and the ending of the war, and is never heard of again.

I didn't have major issues with canon and the main plot of Season 2 however, because we never get the impression that the actions of the Discovery during that season were all that notorious, or even well-known at all. Much easier to sweep under a rug.

 

Making Michael Burnham an unperson at the end of Season 2 was silly. Sure, have the Discovery and its crew be lost, but the draconian method of removing Burnham out of history isn't doable, in on a free society anyway, which the Federation is kinda-sorta supposed to be. I loved season 2, but just as with season 1, they ran out of juice at the end and had to rush to put a lid on a very complicated (overly so) plot.

Giant universe ending plot arcs are overused. It felt like they were taking queues from Doctor who that did not ever need to be taken.

 

Doctor Who went to that well way too often. I was happy to see they toned it down in the most reason series, though some people moaned that the stories didn't "matter." It's the same mindset that has turned mainstream comics into endless events that never have any real consequence.

 

And Vulcan was never conquered...until it was.

Picard notes that ever since disastrous first contact with the Klingons it was multiple years of unremitting hostility. I don't see how having such a large scale conflict cooling to more of a cold war and an arms race is outside the realm of what's presented in TOS.

 

My point is there was absolutely no good dramatic reason it needed to happen whatsoever.

To the extent that Season 1 had an identifiable arc, it was about Michael Burnham's personal journey of (self) redemption, from self-hating outcast to model Starfleet officer. The emotional core of the story is that Micheal - through a series of poor decisions - causes her commanding officer, mentor, and surrogate mother figure to get killed. She then has a long, slow climb back upward to acceptance, which ultimately leads to her trusting her own internal moral compass once again, lapping the judgement of those in a position of power above her - but this time for the right reasons. They could have told the exact same story in terms of character beats with Micheal not being personally responsible for the war, the war being a relatively minor border skirmish, Georgiou not being one of the most famous captains in Starfleet, the spore drive not existing, etc. None of that shit matters, and none of it helped us to connect with the characters.

I actually think the first season would have worked much better if Discovery was just some rando third-rate tin bucket, because the claustrophobic nature of the first season (where we seldom get off the ship, and seldom actually get much of an idea of how the war is going) would make a lot more sense if we were dealing with a ship of random mooks.

 

Agree to disagree.

 

In fiction, the best stakes are personal ones, regardless of the scale of the story being told. That's not to say that a great story cannot be told on an epic scale. But IMHO global-crisis level stakes work best as a "one and done" sort of thing. Repeatedly using them makes a setting seem campy, like James Bond or a comic book series.

 

I felt sufficiently invested in Burnham's stakes that moving in to the epic stakes was more seamless for me.

I know that will vary since Burnham, as a character, is not someone everyone connects with. For me, the Klingon and Mirror Universe arc all tie back to Burnham and so the personal extended to the epic for me.

 

The crew of the Discovery were no more integral to the survival of the Federation than the Enterprise was during the TOS run. There are numerous TOS stories where the survival of the Federation is at stake and only the crew of the Enterprise are there to act.

 

You appear to not have read much science fiction or watched much science fiction. In science fiction, the big picture and small picture are often best utilized when they are intertwined. Science Fiction is quite a bit different in many ways than the amorphous 'fiction' you speak of.

 

I'm not really making an argument about the effectiveness of the personal stakes, so much as the epic scope of the story not being require to tell the very personally-focused story they set out to tell. Because - as I said - most of the issues that people had relating to canon were because they decided to put so many "first ever's" in the show. Off the top of my head, Michael was "Starfleet's first mutineer," was the first human to ever attend the Vulcan Learning Center and Vulcan Science Academy, served as XO under one of the most decorated captains in Starfleet history, got a chance to serve post-mutiny on the most technologically advanced ship Starfleet had ever made, which could travel anywhere instantaneously, was personally responsible to the deaths of two nominal heads of the Klingon Empire (T'Kuvma and Kol) and personally installed a third one (L'Rell). While her foster brother, Spock, is no one of particular importance yet within-universe, there's evidence that Sarek is more important than just being a senior Federation diplomat, considering how he holds considerable sway in Federation governance based upon his discussion with Admiral Cornwell.

Now, let's step back and consider how you could "de-epic" all of this. Micheal Burnham serves as first officer onboard the U.S.S. Shenzhou under Georgiou - a fine, but not quadrant-famous - captain. There is an encounter near the neutral zone with the Klingons, where a bad judgement call she makes (not "mutiny") results in her captain and surrogate mother figure getting killed. She is court martialed and ejected from Starfleet (not imprisoned for life). The situation in the neutral zone heats up into an outright war, and Michael blames herself for it - even if Starfleet does not directly. The war is going badly, and Starfleet is desperate for warm bodies, so she's given a second chance, serving on the U.S..S. Discovery - a third-rate tin bucket - under Captain Gabriel Lorca. The main story flows out from there, with the same main cast as Season 1, with identical personalities. though obviously the episodes themselves differ in some details. I would personally end the season with something similar to Michael's encounter with Kol in Into the Forest I go, because in terms of her character arc, it was a nice closing - she came full circle, faced down her fears related to Klingons, and won back Georgiou's pin.

The difference though is in TOS there was never really any indication that Kirk was anything other than a young hotshot captain. He mostly got grief from admirals, and we didn't see any award ceremonies until the movies (when the legend of Kirk had been built up in fandom).

Basically, when watching TOS, it's easy to imagine there are dozens of other ships just like Enterprise, out there having identical adventures - sometimes saving Earth in the process. It's just we never see or hear anything about them. But in Discovery, it's hard to believe that there is any other ship which is as integral to solving the issues of the day - because we're explicitly told that the ship is special.

Actually, I almost exclusively read science fiction when I do read fiction. Lot's of science fiction books have relatively low stakes beyond the personal, and are very compelling. For example, Rendezvous with Rama, The Left Hand of Darkness, Flowers for Algernon, Solaris, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are all examples of science fiction books where the Earth/galaxy/universe isn't really under threat, and they are all very compelling in their own way.

Of course, there are examples of epic stakes in science fiction. I love David Brin's Uplift Universe novels, and most of them revolve around whether mankind will continue to exist, and involve galaxy-wide conflicts by the end. They work though because of the attention paid to character. On the other hand, someone like Kevin J. Anderson, or even Peter Hamilton, does epic without really compelling characters, which makes the work far more tiresome. I'd also note that I really think in literary series you can only build up to the big global stakes once (even if across an eight-book series), and then it's done. Again, if you have the same friggin protagonist save the Earth/galaxy/universe from different threats again and again, it just starts feeling like pulphouse, or a comic book, not a serious work of fiction.

 

How Star Trek!

 

Could be an interesting story and I don't mind it at all, aside from Discovery being a "third rate tin bucket." Horrible descriptor even for a supremely ugly ship.

I just enjoy the epic stakes as well in Season 1. Both are perfectly acceptable to me as stories.

 

Seriously?

Maybe you need to watch this clip from "Court Martial" to refresh your memory about there "was never really any indication that Kirk was anything other than a young hotshot captain" :



Or maybe all those episodes where Kirk succeeds where many other Captains, Commodores and Admirals have failed disastrously, leaving behind wrecked starships, dead crews, horribly messed up Human-Alien contact. And this willful denial of yours kind of crushes the credibility of the rest of your post.

I agree, mainstream fiction puts extremely low stakes on a pedestal as a measure of "quality". But even as you note, science fiction often and repeatedly features stories with high stakes, because it's often not simply about regular people going about their regular lives. Science fiction is allowed to have Earth-shattering consequences by virtue of what ideas the genre *is expected to tackle* without being shat upon as being "pulp". You can feel free to rail against high stakes stories as being "lesser" than stories with low stakes, but IMO, that is just snobbery. A series of high stakes stories is no more "pulphouse" than a series of low stakes stories simply by virtue of the stakes. As an example, Spider:Master of Men novels often start with a drama level of about 9 and go up from there. That, IMO, is irrelevant to their quality, which is the author's ability to write, which is exceptional where it comes to in maintaining that dramatic level while still offering exceptional writing for the genre he is tackling.

Besides, there are copious examples across all Star Trek of truly abysmally realized low-stakes stories which profoundly demonstrates the fallacy of any claim that reducing the stakes of a Star Trek story makes it better by virtue of having lower stakes.

And The only real difference in this area between Discovery and TOS in particular, or prior series of Star Trek, in general, is entirely structural. TOS is a series of discrete short stories, some of which are low stake some are high stakes. Discovery seasons are written like novels, where each episode is a chapter and the low stakes narratives they contain (of which there are many and often stretched out over multiple episodes, as in novels are stretched out over multiple chapters) are contained within the larger story.

PS, your denigration of comics as a literary art form is noted and rejected. Like any other literary art, there are many award-winning comics and otherwise which refute your notion that they are a lesser art form by virtue of being comics. Heck, there have been many exceptionally written Star Trek comics, for instance.

 

I really love that design!
The one they used was... okay? But this one really would have been great!

Yeah, I think that's the issue.

I think classic Trek gets a bit more away with it because - saving the universe once per season - means roughly once out of every 25 stories. And it's often much less.

In DIS it FEELS like the same people are always saving the universe because all major arcs (Klingon war, multiverse-threatening Georgiou, Control) were about that, and all stand-alone episodes felt like only smaller side stories.