Your postmortem thoughts on DISCO
- Thread starter Charles Phipps
- Start date
Because it's all part of the larger Star Trek story. It's frustrating to skip chapters and miss out because it's become too different to what you've been enjoying.
Not saying 'someone can't do that', just that I'd rather not about the series as a whole before I have seen it in its entirety. (I could, however, talk about season 1 to 3). For all I know seasons 4 or 5 are drastically different.
It's not hard. It's just not desirable.
I've always seen Star Trek as one huge, continuous universe/story. Each entry is a new "chapter".
I don't want to skip chapters in the stories I consume. But I also don't want those chapters to be awful.
There was the Andorian Dude in Season 3, and the Orion Academy cadet. And when it comes down to it, Book sort of. The Couriers seemed to be a loose organization under the Emerald Chain.
I can 100% guarantee you the creators have not gone that far as to know themselves.
In all fairness though, there's a huge shift from S3 to S4 and beyond. The S3 galaxy will look a bit more patchwork.
The scale still seems to be so much smaller than it should be. We're still dealing with the Alpha and Beta Quadrants primarily it seems.
I will take your word for it.
To me, Star Trek is a sand box and not everything requires my attention.
To me, Star Trek is closer to a buffet than a continuous universe or story. Also, there have been chapters that have been awful long before Discovery apparently introduced Trek fans to the concept of bad stories.
But, for me anyway, Star Trek is a buffet. Not every story will appeal, and not every installment is for me. There are episodes of TOS I flat out ignore and skip, even though TOS is my favorite series hands down. There are episodes of ENT that are must watch, even though the rest of the series is absolutely skippable because I can't stand the characters.
Whenever I get to a place in entertainment media of "have to" then I need to step away from the media. So, I treat Trek has a larger menu of stories to enjoy than a thing desired to see all of it.
Mileage will vary.
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Star Trek Discovery is the reset button of Voyager just over a season
Yeah. This is also true of Picard. My biggest gripe about modern serialized Trek (outside of Prodigy) is it's been unable to truly commit to choices having consequences or true long-form storytelling.
In the end, Discovery wasn't about anything. The individual seasons were about something, but the series? No common themes, little in the way of coherent character arcs. It just existed to get us to watch it. And I expect a bit more from filmed media than pure escapist entertainment, though YMMV.
I just felt like there was never anyone particularly talented running the show.
There's so much quality serialized TV nowadays, and DSC was always subpar comparatively in terms of writing. It had its fair share of cringe also.
PIC seasons 1 and 2 were probably worse, but thanks to S3, DSC will probably go down as the worst live action Trek show (although I have a feeling the Academy show will be a strong contender as well).
TOS A
TNG A
DS9 A
VOY C
ENT C
PIC D+
SNW D
DSC D-
There's so much quality serialized TV nowadays, and DSC was always subpar comparatively in terms of writing. It had its fair share of cringe also.
PIC seasons 1 and 2 were probably worse, but thanks to S3, DSC will probably go down as the worst live action Trek show (although I have a feeling the Academy show will be a strong contender as well).
TOS A
TNG A
DS9 A
VOY C
ENT C
PIC D+
SNW D
DSC D-
Late to the thread, but I, like a lot of people, feel that the things that didn't work on this show ultimately ended up overshadowing the things that did.
I don't think Discovery was a failure, but it was boring, and that's easily the bigger sin for me. The only Star Trek show you could ever accuse of being boring prior to this one was Enterprise, and that's not an enviable torch to pick up (the two loud people in the back who thought Enterprise was fantastic will have to forgive me).
There's no reason it had to be so boring really: the budget was higher than it had ever been, and talent-wise it had better actors than any other iteration of Star Trek: Doug Jones, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh - all top names, not just on TV but in the movie business at large. One of the main issues with the show was that it god rid of many of these guys way too quickly, and then it ended up wasting storylines on lesser actors who played lesser characters instead.
The decision to kill off Philippa Georgiou, for instance, only to then bring the Mirrorverse version of her back as a lesser sidekick to Burnham, has to go down as one of the more horrible ones in recent TV history. Michelle then going on to win an Oscar once she was off the show was just adding insult to injury.
Discovery, in short, was a Rolls Royce production that got driven like a Wolksvagen. It had the right backing and all the right circumstances, but never the right vision. Fundamentally, I think it failed to understand what most people find appealing about Star Trek. Consider the captain mess for instance: Saru was obviously the one better suited to that role once Pike left, and I think he was also better suited to being the main character of the show.
A lot has been made of Burnham being the first black female captain, but what if the show had committed to its first *alien* captain instead? The first actor in full body visual makeup to ever helm a big TV show? I for one think we would have had a better show, a better chain of command structure, and more storylines that would have been in line with the nuanced reasoning you'd expect from Star Trek on moral and ethnical dilemmas. Doug Jones is a treasure, and for me there is a sense of sadness over the fact that this show wasted some of his best work.
Burnham never really fit in anywhere, which wasn't Sonequa's fault really: I thought her performances were great in the first two seasons. But the character ended up neither interesting nor wise, which made you wonder why her point of view was being favoured at all. There was a lot of promise initially that she never ended up delivering on, which, again, you could put down to a lack of vision and bad writing.
Pike and the Enterprise arriving at the beginning of season 2 was the point where I knew that Discovery wouldn't work out, because the new characters were a lot more interesting and had a lot more quality to them. I think many felt that Anson Mount in particular was perfect for the TOS look and feel they were going for, and seeing him take the helm made you wonder how anyone could ever have favoured Discovery's version of classic Trek over this.
I was excited about the time jump initially because it felt like a chance to redo the show and start fresh, but the lack of vision and quality meant that the opportunity got wasted, and without anything to really ground them anymore the show quickly fell apart.
Discovery is rightly credited with bringing Trek back to TV, but aside from Strange New Worlds I'm starting to wonder if it was really worth it. It has left me feeling full already, but far from satisfied.
I don't think Discovery was a failure, but it was boring, and that's easily the bigger sin for me. The only Star Trek show you could ever accuse of being boring prior to this one was Enterprise, and that's not an enviable torch to pick up (the two loud people in the back who thought Enterprise was fantastic will have to forgive me).
There's no reason it had to be so boring really: the budget was higher than it had ever been, and talent-wise it had better actors than any other iteration of Star Trek: Doug Jones, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh - all top names, not just on TV but in the movie business at large. One of the main issues with the show was that it god rid of many of these guys way too quickly, and then it ended up wasting storylines on lesser actors who played lesser characters instead.
The decision to kill off Philippa Georgiou, for instance, only to then bring the Mirrorverse version of her back as a lesser sidekick to Burnham, has to go down as one of the more horrible ones in recent TV history. Michelle then going on to win an Oscar once she was off the show was just adding insult to injury.
Discovery, in short, was a Rolls Royce production that got driven like a Wolksvagen. It had the right backing and all the right circumstances, but never the right vision. Fundamentally, I think it failed to understand what most people find appealing about Star Trek. Consider the captain mess for instance: Saru was obviously the one better suited to that role once Pike left, and I think he was also better suited to being the main character of the show.
A lot has been made of Burnham being the first black female captain, but what if the show had committed to its first *alien* captain instead? The first actor in full body visual makeup to ever helm a big TV show? I for one think we would have had a better show, a better chain of command structure, and more storylines that would have been in line with the nuanced reasoning you'd expect from Star Trek on moral and ethnical dilemmas. Doug Jones is a treasure, and for me there is a sense of sadness over the fact that this show wasted some of his best work.
Burnham never really fit in anywhere, which wasn't Sonequa's fault really: I thought her performances were great in the first two seasons. But the character ended up neither interesting nor wise, which made you wonder why her point of view was being favoured at all. There was a lot of promise initially that she never ended up delivering on, which, again, you could put down to a lack of vision and bad writing.
Pike and the Enterprise arriving at the beginning of season 2 was the point where I knew that Discovery wouldn't work out, because the new characters were a lot more interesting and had a lot more quality to them. I think many felt that Anson Mount in particular was perfect for the TOS look and feel they were going for, and seeing him take the helm made you wonder how anyone could ever have favoured Discovery's version of classic Trek over this.
I was excited about the time jump initially because it felt like a chance to redo the show and start fresh, but the lack of vision and quality meant that the opportunity got wasted, and without anything to really ground them anymore the show quickly fell apart.
Discovery is rightly credited with bringing Trek back to TV, but aside from Strange New Worlds I'm starting to wonder if it was really worth it. It has left me feeling full already, but far from satisfied.
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So, you get a show you enjoy, as well as 3 other shows spun off, plus more in production and that's not worth it?
I did say aside from Strange New Worlds.
You did, I acknowledge that.
I'm curious as to the metric behind making it worth it? Call it a morbid curiosity on my part as to this idea.
Because of the characters. People don't realize this but the characters n Discovery, and what Fuller initially pitched, still resonated with several. The design language, the concepts, the characters and events all pulled me in despite the very disorderly BTS.
We didn't start out with Mount because that was not what was pitched.
Retrospectively, this excellent TNG-style season sort of has an afterglow to it. The codas are some of my favorite for any show, with perfect sentimentality and answerd most, though not all of our questions. It's pretty satisfying for Discovery fans.
I'll be rewatching the Bluray as soon as I can.
I'll be rewatching the Bluray as soon as I can.
It was bad in the same way Picard was bad. It was performative. It was like it could just go:
TREK. LGBT. KIRKMORNGOMEZMANEUVER. BLACK. LOVE ME!
But it never showed intelligence enough to stitch together compelling narratives or story arcs. Basic writing, fundamentally.
I also didn't like how it was the Burnham show, who can do no wrong. It suffered in the same way Supernatural did in later seasons. If you're basically a god, or dealing with gods, dealing with universe-level danger... it all gets boring and in fact loses any danger.
Sonequa Martin-Green was good, Burnham was not.
It also means all of the Trek to date was largely pointless.
Admittedly I gave up in season 3. And I am writing a few hodge podge sentences on the fly. They are not meant for scrutiny, just a quick brain dump. I can't even articulate proper thoughts on it as it's just not worth the brain space.
TREK. LGBT. KIRKMORNGOMEZMANEUVER. BLACK. LOVE ME!
But it never showed intelligence enough to stitch together compelling narratives or story arcs. Basic writing, fundamentally.
I also didn't like how it was the Burnham show, who can do no wrong. It suffered in the same way Supernatural did in later seasons. If you're basically a god, or dealing with gods, dealing with universe-level danger... it all gets boring and in fact loses any danger.
Sonequa Martin-Green was good, Burnham was not.
It also means all of the Trek to date was largely pointless.
Admittedly I gave up in season 3. And I am writing a few hodge podge sentences on the fly. They are not meant for scrutiny, just a quick brain dump. I can't even articulate proper thoughts on it as it's just not worth the brain space.
No. I imagine you mean because we see what the future is like, but the future wouldn't be that way if it wasn't for everything before it. Was Enterprise's Xindi arc 'pointless' because we knew Earth was intact from TNG? The Best of Both Worlds doesn't magically stop being an epic story at the pinnacle of Trek because if you watch Voyager first you know the Borg are defeated.
No. Later stories can destroy earlier strories, very much so.
Picard shit all over the end of TNG and Generations and effectively tried to make the story pointless. Star Wars the new trilogy made Vader's sacrifice pointless and thus his entire redemption arc.
In Discovery's case, perhaps "undermines" is a better word than "pointless".
But I have chosen to just not include Discovery in my personal canon, like Picard.
I used to not believe this, until I went to watch some TNG after Picard. All I see now? Is Robot Picard.
I still do not believe it.
I still watch MASH even though AFTER MASH had some oddball and sad stories.
Still watch The Three Musketeers even though D'Artagnan dies at the end of Man in the Iron Mask.
Still watch the OT as the only Star Wars. The rest are fun side stories, relatively unrelated.
Still watch TOS and the TOS films even though Kirk dies in Generations.
I cannot even begin to fathom somehow a new story taking away the enjoyment of a story that I have already enjoyed.
I still watch MASH even though AFTER MASH had some oddball and sad stories.
Still watch The Three Musketeers even though D'Artagnan dies at the end of Man in the Iron Mask.
Still watch the OT as the only Star Wars. The rest are fun side stories, relatively unrelated.
Still watch TOS and the TOS films even though Kirk dies in Generations.
I cannot even begin to fathom somehow a new story taking away the enjoyment of a story that I have already enjoyed.
So all Luke's kissing scenes in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back still play the same for you after seeing Return of the Jedi?
I remember a cartoon right after Crisis on Infinite Earths (the comic) that showed a bunch of old comic books and a line like, "My Silver Age Batmans... fading away... as if they never existed!" 
I still do not believe it.
I cannot even begin to fathom somehow a new story taking away the enjoyment of a story that I have already enjoyed.
You don't need to, on both accounts. You do you.
