I'll meet you in that middle.
Your postmortem thoughts on DISCO
- Thread starter Charles Phipps
- Start date
I don't get the feeling that Kurtzman's position is solidified at all.
My perception is that Kurtzman's position is tenuous because Paramount's economic position is tenuous. My feel is that whether SNW goes beyond season 5 is an open question, and Starfleet Academy is a stopgap measure based on limiting costs while feeling the need to have some type of Star Trek programming within the realities of Paramount+'s current financial position.
I honestly don't think Kurtzman has a bias against Matalas's idea for a Legacy series, but Paramount+ can't justify it economicially given their commitments to SNW and Starfleet Academy. If the reaction to SFA is negative, and the end of SNW is lukewarm, I can see a change in direction.
Perhaps they'll stop altogether.
In terms of seasons, it kind of repeats what I said about episodes. A lot of uos and downs.
S2 and S3 are my favorites in a lot of ways (If Memory Serves, Pike, New Eden, The first 5-6 eps of S3 are great), but the ending arc in S2 is so dumb it lost me, ditto the explanation for the Burn. With the endings so poor, I cannot in good conscience call either my favorite season, though each may hit the highest notes of the series for me.
S1 is close, the highs are not quite as high, but the ending also got silly in the MU and while the Kingon war ending was also a bit strained.
S4 was the only time the stuck the landing. And even then Tarka/Book are just silly, what, you don't think this will piss them off? And somehow they cannot just capture Book's ship? But in the main those closing 3 eps were darn good. But that season dealing with losing Kwejain (sp) and the DMA is dark, and hard to feel as good about save for the Sormy Weather > But to Connect in the middle.
By the time season 5 hit, I wasn't invested enough to care much amymore. It was just more 'meh' for me all the way through. Maybe time will change that. Not horrible. And a nice touch at the end. But turning "The Chase" into 10 episodes was a bit of a stretch.
I cannot say there was a great season in there, a TOS1, TNG3, DS96 type of season. Heck, TOS2, TNG4-6, DS93-5, ENT3-4, VOY4, PIC3 is even a stretch. Or LD2 or PRO1. I think in DISCO 1-4 there were parts of great seasons in there, in each. But we never go the whole enchilada.
YMMV, of course.
S2 and S3 are my favorites in a lot of ways (If Memory Serves, Pike, New Eden, The first 5-6 eps of S3 are great), but the ending arc in S2 is so dumb it lost me, ditto the explanation for the Burn. With the endings so poor, I cannot in good conscience call either my favorite season, though each may hit the highest notes of the series for me.
S1 is close, the highs are not quite as high, but the ending also got silly in the MU and while the Kingon war ending was also a bit strained.
S4 was the only time the stuck the landing. And even then Tarka/Book are just silly, what, you don't think this will piss them off? And somehow they cannot just capture Book's ship? But in the main those closing 3 eps were darn good. But that season dealing with losing Kwejain (sp) and the DMA is dark, and hard to feel as good about save for the Sormy Weather > But to Connect in the middle.
By the time season 5 hit, I wasn't invested enough to care much amymore. It was just more 'meh' for me all the way through. Maybe time will change that. Not horrible. And a nice touch at the end. But turning "The Chase" into 10 episodes was a bit of a stretch.
I cannot say there was a great season in there, a TOS1, TNG3, DS96 type of season. Heck, TOS2, TNG4-6, DS93-5, ENT3-4, VOY4, PIC3 is even a stretch. Or LD2 or PRO1. I think in DISCO 1-4 there were parts of great seasons in there, in each. But we never go the whole enchilada.
YMMV, of course.
I think watching as much New Trek as I have, I'm not letting continuity bother me because I might start looking at Star Trek more along the lines of eras and what each era brought to the franchise. You have the original era. You have the 70s wacky Pink era with the Animated Series. You have the 90s Star Trek universe era that seemed connected and lasted for 18 years. Then you had the Kelvin era and that series of movies. Now you have the streaming era with Kurtzman and Paramount+ and the number of uniform changes we have been seeing amongst other things. Whatever the new era will be, I don't think they should be bound by what came before. I just wish they would move things forward and try not to do prequels.
The only argument against this whole era idea was Picard, which could be used as a transitional point between past and now, especially Season 3.
US TV ratings are bogus (if anything deserves to be TV-MA, it's the Icheb eyeball torture porn PICARD episode, and it was only listed as TV-14 on P+).
That said, glancing at the British episode ratings, season 1 has five "15" (hard PG-13 / soft R) rated episodes. Season 2 only has one "15". Season 3 has three "15"s, and season 4 has none. So the series did mellow over time!
Especially with the pending potential sale. Usually when a studio changes hands, everything not already in active development gets shut down so the new people can come in and put their own spin on things. Star Trek probably hasn't been this up in the air since 2019.
The Icheb Scene in PIC Season 1 is the only scene in New Trek where I look away.
I have to specify New Trek because in "The Enemy Within", I still look away at points during the scene with Rand and Evil Kirk.
Transporter scene in The Motion Picture.
Anything with Ceti Eels.
Remmick's death.
Riker getting cut in Frame of Mind.
Pike's torture.
Favo's disruptor.
Anything with Ceti Eels.
Remmick's death.
Riker getting cut in Frame of Mind.
Pike's torture.
Favo's disruptor.
I have to say, out of ALL of the seasons of ALL Trek series combined, this is THE WORST by far.
"Come on kiddies! Let's go on a treasure hunt and collect clues!" Bad story to end the series with, and should have been left out altogether.
The first two seasons were gritty, which was a nice change from previous series. But, ending up in the timeline they did, and the ability to spin the ship around a hundred times and magically appear exactly where they wanted to be, was a bit lame.
And, they could have done without the child prodigy, too. She was more annoying than Tilly.
"Come on kiddies! Let's go on a treasure hunt and collect clues!" Bad story to end the series with, and should have been left out altogether.
The first two seasons were gritty, which was a nice change from previous series. But, ending up in the timeline they did, and the ability to spin the ship around a hundred times and magically appear exactly where they wanted to be, was a bit lame.
And, they could have done without the child prodigy, too. She was more annoying than Tilly.
Out of all of those, only the Ceti Eel stands out to me.
Remmick's Death would've, but it was too over-the-top for me to take seriously. Even when I was a kid.
The more realistic the violence seems, the harder it hits. If it doesn't look real, it doesn't register with me.
Without looking them up, I'm going to guess they were:
S2
"Point of Light"
S3
"Scavengers"
"Terra Firma, Part I"
"Terra Firma, Part II"
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This is why the ultra-violence in ROBOCOP works so well. It’s so over the top that it becomes cartoonish and not at all disturbing, whereas ROBOCOP 2 toned down the over the top violence and as a result some scenes just became disturbing, like when a kid is forced to watch a guy have his stomach sliced open and it’s played horrifically.
2x10 "The Red Angel" -- brief strong injury detail, threat (Maybe that's the Leland eyeball / assimilation episode?)
"Scavengers" -- check -- strong violence
"Terra Firma, Part II" -- check -- strong violence
but "The Sanctuary" instead of Part I -- strong bloody images
Yeah "Conspiracy" is just too over the top. UK only gives it a 12 for "Contains fantasy horror and gore".
TWOK... even the sanitized for Saturday afternoon for TV viewing cut version was enough to freak me out as a 3rd grader and give me a bug getting into my ear or eye phobia for life.
The BBFC actually has a case study on the different ratings for TWOK.
"The examiner report for Wrath of Khan notes that the film, with "various explosions, deaths", was a likely A category. However a scene in which Khan tortures two of the captured Enterprise crew, by placing "lobster-like slugs" in their ears, contained two shots which were "almost X" material. Hence an AA certificate was proposed for the uncut version of the film. An A certificate would require the two shots to be cut - sight of the slugs crawling in to the ears and the shot of a slug crawling "bloodily" out of Chekhov's ear. The distributor U.I.P. opted to make the cuts and the film was passed A."
"In 1987 the same theatrical cut was released on video and given a PG certificate. In 1988 CIC Video submitted a version of the film with the slug shots reinstated, and that release was given a 15. Following the 1994 introduction of the 12 certificate for video works, a 2002 DVD release of Wrath of Khan - again complete with slugs - was passed 12, and the film remains at that category for home viewing."
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tbf I think the serialized 10-13 episode season could work if they did a netflix-style dump of the whole season at once so people can binge the whole thing. Where P+ releases one episode a week for 10 weeks feels like it drags along with the multi-year long breaks between seasons.
I actually like the season-long stories for Star Trek. It's a nice change from the "everything is set right" stand-alone episodes. SNW is still episodic, so, there's that.
The fear of upsetting the angry internet mob definitely caused problems and pleased nobody.
If they stuck to their guns I probably still wouldn't like the show personally but would have at least liked it objectively.
In the end I think it was mostly a show of missed opportunities and wasted potential.
But it's hard to be objective because it was so far from the type of Trek revival show I had in my head and was a writing and narrative style I was never going to be into. I'm desperate for something more geopolitical like PIC S1 fooled me into thinking it was.
This is quite possibly the longest post I have ever made on the TrekBBS… long enough that I decided to go to my work laptop and type it, send it to myself in an email, and copy and paste it here. There is no chance I could have typed all of this with one finger on my phone, so to help keep the length of the post shorter, I will put my thoughts in a Spoiler Tag.
DISCO as a series…
Overall, I like the show fine. There are things in its bones that are very much the philosophy of the franchise, so it has earned the name STAR TREK. Could it have been better? Absolutely, given how many things that they had to work with. I don’t think starting this as a prequel was a good idea, but that doesn’t mean it would automatically have not worked. ENT worked for me, except for that damned Temporal Cold War. By the same token, I think they went too far into the future for season 3 onward. There were centuries that we never even looked at that could have worked. All those intervening centuries only had a couple of small hints and whispers… it was an even more blank canvas than the Lost Era between the end of THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY and the beginning of TNG. It would have avoided probably ALL of the issues of appearance with technology and ships from the 23rd century. Easily could have made this 80-100 years after VOY ended, just like how TNG started. There was a lot of missed opportunities with this show, so it feels like VOY in that regard. But I have to go by what I see in the series, and because of this, my current ranking of STAR TREK shows is this…
1. DS9
2. TNG
3. VOY
4. TOS
5. ENT
6. SNW
7. LDS
8. PRODIGY
9. PICARD
10. TAS
11. DISCO
(I can’t give SNW or LDS higher ranks because they have not been around long enough. Test of time is best… in 5 or 10 more years, I think I can reevaluate them better to see if they rank higher. Sometimes my numbers 3 - 5 switch around, but DS9 always has been my #1, with TNG strongly holding #2.)
DISCO as a series…
There are some things that I thought were done well. But there are a LOT of things that just didn’t work for me. I’ll start with off with the positives, in no particular order.
1 – The effects were excellent. Though I didn’t agree with a number of things done with the effects, I can’t say that it was ever badly done.
2 – We got a good representation of LGBT in this series, much better than in previous shows. Stamets/Culber were a good, believable couple. Gay, straight, other… I don’t care. It was good to see a romantic relationship/marriage done well, something we rarely see in the franchise. (Miles/Keiko, Ben/Kasidy, and Tom/B’Elanna are really the only other ones that have been done well.) I do wish the relationship wasn’t basically ignored in later seasons, though.
3 – Saru: absolutely the MVP of the entire series, from the pilot to the finale. There was never a bad scene with him. In my mind, Doug Jones was the true star of the show.
4 - DISCO launched a new era for the franchise… ironically, with EVERY series being better than DISCO.
5 – We got STRANGE NEW WORLDS because of Anson Mount being cast as Pike in season 2. He was quite honestly the ONLY great thing about that season, which I count as the second worst in the entire franchise. Proof that good can come from something bad.
6 – Rayner. He was DESPERATELY needed for the series in season 5, and I am thrilled they cast Callum Keith Rennie in the role. He was excellent, and I sincerely hope we see more of him in the Academy series or something else.
Now comes the things that didn’t work for me, also in no particular order.
1 – The emotional breakdowns/pouring of feelings in the middle of a full blown emergency situation. Things like this can happen to professionals… once in a while. But when it is done in virtually EVERY SINGLE EPISODE?! Two problems with this: first, it loses its effectiveness because of the frequency of this happening and second, it makes these Starfleet officers look amateurish. There are only two characters that this would have been even remotely believable… Tilly and Adira. Not only because they just started their Starfleet careers, but because they are the youngest and would likely have the least experience in dealing with emergency situations without losing it. But all the others? You have all these officers who are Lt. Commander ranks and above, so clearly they have been in the service for a quite a while and would have faced many threats and emergencies. But they still do this on a regular basis? It completely took me out of the show when these scenes happened, and this happened A LOT. These are supposed to be professionals… deal with the problem/threat/emergency/ticking clock to extinction first, then have your breakdown if you need it. Would this be acceptable behavior for an ER doctor who has to treat a dozen or more patients brought in after some disaster? Or a firefighter in the middle of a blaze with a family about to get burned to a crisp in seconds? Or an officer trying to protect a group of kids with a shooter on the loose? If these things happened to those doctors/firefighters/cops, lives get lost… and they would be rightfully fired from the job. I couldn’t take any of these people seriously on DISCO, which makes it hard to care about the characters. And if I don’t care about the characters, the show is already fighting a very hard uphill battle for me.
2 – Making Burnham Spock’s adoptive sister. It was completely unnecessary. This is already telegraphing that they don’t believe in the show’s characters enough to feel that they can stand on their own. Look at TNG: not one character had any connection to TOS. None. And when you are making the star of the series so directly tied to a TOS character, you are saying you don’t believe in that character, and by extension the series itself, enough to be interesting enough on their own without that connection. Burnham could have had the EXACT SAME BACKGROUND with a brand new Vulcan family we had never heard of before, and it would have changed NOTHING about the character. Even the situation with Spock in season 2, she could have simply been a close friend or colleague from before and it would have changed almost nothing about that story. (The ONLY thing that this would have changed would be season 1’s “Lethe”, and while that is one of the only episodes of season 1 I really liked because it finally gave us WHY Sarek and Spock had that rift their whole lives, this could easily have been done on SNW down the road or just not at all. Sometimes, fathers and sons simply don’t get along, and that is something I can imagine and live with.)
3 – The season long arcs. This was definitely a big problem with DISCO, and frankly STAR TREK in general. With the exception of PICARD season 3, the current era of seasonal arcs were just bad in one way or another. For this series specifically, season 1 was just meh. Season 2 was just ABYSMAL. Season 3’s arc was actually pretty decent and didn’t meander quite that much in the middle, but the ending, and especially The Burn’s cause, was TERRIBLE. Season 4 was just a slog to go through, but the ending was fantastic. Season 5 only somewhat stuck the landing, but while the rest of the season didn’t meander TOO badly, it certainly wasn’t consistent all the way through. I was truly hoping that the final season would flow well from start to finish and have an ending that stuck the landing… in fact, that was ALL I wanted from that season. The writers couldn’t even get that right after years of attempts. Conclusion: STAR TREK really needs to stay away from season long arcs. 1 good one out of 8 is terrible… doing what ENT did in season 4 is probably the best solution, particularly in this era of short seasons.
4 – Burnham… I just didn’t find her that compelling. They gave her too many cheat codes, for lack of a better term. Even when she was wrong, she had to somehow be shown to be right. It was annoying. Also, comparing Sonequa Martin-Green to Shatner, Stewart, Brooks, Mulgrew, Bakula, and Mount… I find her to be the weakest of the live action lead actors/actresses. If the lead of your series does not have the presence to carry it (particularly on a series that is essentially her story from pilot to finale), the series suffers. Had this been more of an ensemble like it was pretending to be a few times throughout the show, this issue could have been mitigated a bit.
5 – Telling instead of showing why these characters are connected and why they matter. This is precisely why I felt nothing during the finale. Even with “ENDGAME”, I still felt for the crew because we were SHOWN why these characters are close and why they matter. As examples, we saw Tom and Harry as best friends with their scenes and episodes together, we saw The Doctor grow from a holographic projection to a real character, and we saw Seven getting her humanity back bit by bit. With DISCO, it was more telling than showing. Now, part of the problem might be due to the short seasons and how the arcs didn’t give the characters (or the episodes, for that matter) any room to breathe and for this world to feel lived in. I don’t know. But the writers just telling us that this crew are connected without really showing us they are connected… for a series that is supposed to pride itself on connection with people, it sure was strangely disconnected.
6 – And while I am speaking about the finale, I think the epilogue tying into “CALYPSO” should not have happened and actually hurt the finale as a whole. If it stopped at the beach with Michael and Book beaming away, I probably would have rated it a 6. That SHORT TREK one-off could have been exactly that… a one-off. It would have been better that way.
7. Another thing about the epilogue. Having it center so completely on Burnham in the future for those 20 minutes and the rest of the crew in flashback hug only for only about 30 seconds truly cemented that this series was simply about Burnham. The writers wanted it like that, fine. But don't pretend it was an ensemble and that the other characters mattered because what we are being shown clearly indicates they didn't matter.
1 – The effects were excellent. Though I didn’t agree with a number of things done with the effects, I can’t say that it was ever badly done.
2 – We got a good representation of LGBT in this series, much better than in previous shows. Stamets/Culber were a good, believable couple. Gay, straight, other… I don’t care. It was good to see a romantic relationship/marriage done well, something we rarely see in the franchise. (Miles/Keiko, Ben/Kasidy, and Tom/B’Elanna are really the only other ones that have been done well.) I do wish the relationship wasn’t basically ignored in later seasons, though.
3 – Saru: absolutely the MVP of the entire series, from the pilot to the finale. There was never a bad scene with him. In my mind, Doug Jones was the true star of the show.
4 - DISCO launched a new era for the franchise… ironically, with EVERY series being better than DISCO.
5 – We got STRANGE NEW WORLDS because of Anson Mount being cast as Pike in season 2. He was quite honestly the ONLY great thing about that season, which I count as the second worst in the entire franchise. Proof that good can come from something bad.
6 – Rayner. He was DESPERATELY needed for the series in season 5, and I am thrilled they cast Callum Keith Rennie in the role. He was excellent, and I sincerely hope we see more of him in the Academy series or something else.
Now comes the things that didn’t work for me, also in no particular order.
1 – The emotional breakdowns/pouring of feelings in the middle of a full blown emergency situation. Things like this can happen to professionals… once in a while. But when it is done in virtually EVERY SINGLE EPISODE?! Two problems with this: first, it loses its effectiveness because of the frequency of this happening and second, it makes these Starfleet officers look amateurish. There are only two characters that this would have been even remotely believable… Tilly and Adira. Not only because they just started their Starfleet careers, but because they are the youngest and would likely have the least experience in dealing with emergency situations without losing it. But all the others? You have all these officers who are Lt. Commander ranks and above, so clearly they have been in the service for a quite a while and would have faced many threats and emergencies. But they still do this on a regular basis? It completely took me out of the show when these scenes happened, and this happened A LOT. These are supposed to be professionals… deal with the problem/threat/emergency/ticking clock to extinction first, then have your breakdown if you need it. Would this be acceptable behavior for an ER doctor who has to treat a dozen or more patients brought in after some disaster? Or a firefighter in the middle of a blaze with a family about to get burned to a crisp in seconds? Or an officer trying to protect a group of kids with a shooter on the loose? If these things happened to those doctors/firefighters/cops, lives get lost… and they would be rightfully fired from the job. I couldn’t take any of these people seriously on DISCO, which makes it hard to care about the characters. And if I don’t care about the characters, the show is already fighting a very hard uphill battle for me.
2 – Making Burnham Spock’s adoptive sister. It was completely unnecessary. This is already telegraphing that they don’t believe in the show’s characters enough to feel that they can stand on their own. Look at TNG: not one character had any connection to TOS. None. And when you are making the star of the series so directly tied to a TOS character, you are saying you don’t believe in that character, and by extension the series itself, enough to be interesting enough on their own without that connection. Burnham could have had the EXACT SAME BACKGROUND with a brand new Vulcan family we had never heard of before, and it would have changed NOTHING about the character. Even the situation with Spock in season 2, she could have simply been a close friend or colleague from before and it would have changed almost nothing about that story. (The ONLY thing that this would have changed would be season 1’s “Lethe”, and while that is one of the only episodes of season 1 I really liked because it finally gave us WHY Sarek and Spock had that rift their whole lives, this could easily have been done on SNW down the road or just not at all. Sometimes, fathers and sons simply don’t get along, and that is something I can imagine and live with.)
3 – The season long arcs. This was definitely a big problem with DISCO, and frankly STAR TREK in general. With the exception of PICARD season 3, the current era of seasonal arcs were just bad in one way or another. For this series specifically, season 1 was just meh. Season 2 was just ABYSMAL. Season 3’s arc was actually pretty decent and didn’t meander quite that much in the middle, but the ending, and especially The Burn’s cause, was TERRIBLE. Season 4 was just a slog to go through, but the ending was fantastic. Season 5 only somewhat stuck the landing, but while the rest of the season didn’t meander TOO badly, it certainly wasn’t consistent all the way through. I was truly hoping that the final season would flow well from start to finish and have an ending that stuck the landing… in fact, that was ALL I wanted from that season. The writers couldn’t even get that right after years of attempts. Conclusion: STAR TREK really needs to stay away from season long arcs. 1 good one out of 8 is terrible… doing what ENT did in season 4 is probably the best solution, particularly in this era of short seasons.
4 – Burnham… I just didn’t find her that compelling. They gave her too many cheat codes, for lack of a better term. Even when she was wrong, she had to somehow be shown to be right. It was annoying. Also, comparing Sonequa Martin-Green to Shatner, Stewart, Brooks, Mulgrew, Bakula, and Mount… I find her to be the weakest of the live action lead actors/actresses. If the lead of your series does not have the presence to carry it (particularly on a series that is essentially her story from pilot to finale), the series suffers. Had this been more of an ensemble like it was pretending to be a few times throughout the show, this issue could have been mitigated a bit.
5 – Telling instead of showing why these characters are connected and why they matter. This is precisely why I felt nothing during the finale. Even with “ENDGAME”, I still felt for the crew because we were SHOWN why these characters are close and why they matter. As examples, we saw Tom and Harry as best friends with their scenes and episodes together, we saw The Doctor grow from a holographic projection to a real character, and we saw Seven getting her humanity back bit by bit. With DISCO, it was more telling than showing. Now, part of the problem might be due to the short seasons and how the arcs didn’t give the characters (or the episodes, for that matter) any room to breathe and for this world to feel lived in. I don’t know. But the writers just telling us that this crew are connected without really showing us they are connected… for a series that is supposed to pride itself on connection with people, it sure was strangely disconnected.
6 – And while I am speaking about the finale, I think the epilogue tying into “CALYPSO” should not have happened and actually hurt the finale as a whole. If it stopped at the beach with Michael and Book beaming away, I probably would have rated it a 6. That SHORT TREK one-off could have been exactly that… a one-off. It would have been better that way.
7. Another thing about the epilogue. Having it center so completely on Burnham in the future for those 20 minutes and the rest of the crew in flashback hug only for only about 30 seconds truly cemented that this series was simply about Burnham. The writers wanted it like that, fine. But don't pretend it was an ensemble and that the other characters mattered because what we are being shown clearly indicates they didn't matter.
Overall, I like the show fine. There are things in its bones that are very much the philosophy of the franchise, so it has earned the name STAR TREK. Could it have been better? Absolutely, given how many things that they had to work with. I don’t think starting this as a prequel was a good idea, but that doesn’t mean it would automatically have not worked. ENT worked for me, except for that damned Temporal Cold War. By the same token, I think they went too far into the future for season 3 onward. There were centuries that we never even looked at that could have worked. All those intervening centuries only had a couple of small hints and whispers… it was an even more blank canvas than the Lost Era between the end of THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY and the beginning of TNG. It would have avoided probably ALL of the issues of appearance with technology and ships from the 23rd century. Easily could have made this 80-100 years after VOY ended, just like how TNG started. There was a lot of missed opportunities with this show, so it feels like VOY in that regard. But I have to go by what I see in the series, and because of this, my current ranking of STAR TREK shows is this…
1. DS9
2. TNG
3. VOY
4. TOS
5. ENT
6. SNW
7. LDS
8. PRODIGY
9. PICARD
10. TAS
11. DISCO
(I can’t give SNW or LDS higher ranks because they have not been around long enough. Test of time is best… in 5 or 10 more years, I think I can reevaluate them better to see if they rank higher. Sometimes my numbers 3 - 5 switch around, but DS9 always has been my #1, with TNG strongly holding #2.)
I think to add on to your points ... My biggest issue with the show is how superficial they treated the ideas within the stories and the emotions of the characterizations. To me, it was a melodramatic action-show, first and foremost, but never really wanted to deal with the realities of the ideas they presented.
For example, I mentioned upthread the sort of lip-service debate about the ethics and morality of the Progenitor tech in the series finale before it gets thrown away. That's something which in a previous Trek series could have been the basis of an entire episode, where you have fully realized characters with unique perspectives putting forward arguments that could make the audience think and debate about it in an intelligent way.
And here they toss all of that aside as just an afterthought at the end. It's something treated as fait accompli because the episode thinks flashy visuals during a fist-fight and flame-throwers going off on the bridge are more important. It doesn't want to get in the way of the action scenes or delay getting to Saru's wedding to have an intelligent discussion about THE MAIN FOCUS OF THE PLOT FOR THE ENTIRE SEASON!!!
And I always felt that superficiality carried over to the emotions of the characters. In my opinion, the reason the emotionality of the characters became a flash-point among a lot of fans is that they went to that well so much, but also they did so in ways that didn't feel believable and real.
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Why some fans seem to wish for this is baffling to me. If they do, Trek will lie fallow for at least a decade and perhaps never come back. It would be very sad.
I'd rather have no Trek than bad Trek or Trek that contradicts the stories I like. If they're not going to do it right they might as well just stop. For 10 years or forever.
On the other hand, I'd much rather have good Trek than no Trek, and the Kurtzman era has given me plenty of that, so I'm in no rush to see him leave. I'm in no rush to see Starfleet Academy or Section 31 either mind you, but I'm sure we're not done with the late 24th/25th century for good.
