The show has gone down the road of pseudo-"visions", talks with "dead" people inside a character's head, character "reveals" that are handled poorly, and other trite modern schtick. This was innovative only once, in the mid-1990s, when people like Joss Whedon did it, and used it far more judiciously, with self-awareness of how ridiculous it is. It has become a sickly cloying symbol of hack writing in other people's hands. What's next, maybe the show can incorporate psuedo-prophets having visions that nobody is sure whether to trust? A person inexplicably returning from the dead with a prophetic warning? Cara Thrace leading the Federation to it's destiny? The USS Destiny journeying to the center of the universe in search of "god", encountering will-o-whips that take the form of their deceased family members. Perhaps entire episodes can be dreams in future?
I wanted to like Discovery, I really did, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt, as you all know, for so long, but it's cringeworthy watching this.
Perhaps io9's unremitting criticism was right.
Star Trek used to be a show which was grounded in a naturalistic view of the world. Society was what we made of it, not contingent on supernatural forces. Puzzles could be understood with observation/thought. Problems could be overcome or engineered, if society was wise and careful enough. Social issues could be solved with enough understanding. It was, at it's most popular, an unabashed moral sermon too. The two most popular shows, TOS and TNG, were the most earnestly formatted this way. Everything that history tells us makes civilization good - reason, science, humane ethics, realism, the ability to forgive, or to exercise discipline - Star Trek was a partisan for - like some collection of entertaining analects disguised behind an action show.
It has now turned into something decadent in the worst sense of the word, with Discovery. It's like watching the ideas that a writing class in a school might come up with,
"miss, what if they communicate via space fungus, meet each other in a dream world, and his dead boyfriend gives him a message". No attempt to clad it in a veneer of science any more, the audience has to perform constant gymnastics to justify it. What a pity; the show has hints of great ideas, the show could have been Star Trek's most diverse statement in favor of naturalism, instead it feels like we are slipping back into the dark ages.
Perhaps given enough time, the show will change and become something else, worth watching. But right now, I'm done defending it or giving it the benefit of the doubt. I don't think we should accept this standard of quality from such a popular franchise, when there are shows as thoughtful as Westworld on TV, or Blade Runner 2049 in the cinema, and when other old science fiction franchises are being handled so reverently.
It's depressing to watch Star Trek become a mystical soap opera. On the positive side, recent attempts at Star Trek have, as many people have noted, brought the 'colorfulness' back into Trek - more things can happen than in the latter days of Voyager, when the colorfulness had been washed away - but the problem is that every bad juvenile trend in storytelling from the last ten years has been present to some degree too.
