I have mixed feelings about Disco ending. I really dug the first season’s look at a Federation at war, and following the person who arguably set that war in motion dealing with her culpability. Add to that a ship that is part weird science lab, part haunted house. And yeah, I could live with the Klingon redesign.

It was inventive, it took risks and broke some moulds — and not always successfully, mind you. But I stuck with it from the hopeful “First three seasons are for growing pains” Trek paradigm.

Then the show took some odd turns. Rather than focusing on the crew’s adventures in space and science, season two constructed a cosmic conundrum around Burnham and her family. I was still on board for the characters, even bearded Spock no matter how shoehorned in he felt. The show’s unapologetic optimism was still a big selling point, too.

With season three came the time jump into a future that absolutely does not feel like it’s a thousand years ahead of the previous season. The jump in technology should be proportional to a Viking longboat rocking up to the ISS, but it felt like a step back. And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham’s personal relationships took priority over everything else.

For one example: As great as Michelle Yeoh is, the show basically redeemed a murderous space despot because… she reminded Burnham of her Starfleet counterpart?! I’m going to stop you right there, Captain “This is Starfleet” — this is a person who kept rubbing in Saru’s face how familiar she was with the taste of his species’ flesh.

I’ll keep watching Disco through to its end because I’m invested in the remaining characters, but this isn’t the show I apprehensively fell in love with anymore. Its strengths are all but gone, its faults enhanced, and its commercial(?) failure seems to have convinced the Powers That Be that future Star Trek needs to be grounded in nostalgia for previous eras.

I will miss the first season’s promise of new, daring Trek shows writ large, and as much as I liked Pike and his crew in season two, SNW leans too heavily and knowingly on the franchise’s campier canon for my taste (I know I’m in a minority with that opinion, and I’m not here to argue for or against). With peak TV fading, I’m afraid we won’t see anything as bold as TNG, DS9 — or early Discovery — again.

  • Handles@leminal.spaceOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This is exactly what got me into Discovery! The willingness to go beyond convention and subvert viewer expectation.

    So often throughout season one they’d hit me with something that I’d never seen done in Star trek before, and I’d be in the edge of my seat until next week. The whole introduction of the USS Discovery — which wasn’t until the third episode — had so much of a weird science vibe, I was blown away. And then the body horror of the USS Glenn.

    Spore drives! Feral tardigrades! Space whales! All that, and pitting Starfleet in a war against Klingons that were really, truly alien for the first time in decades. Oh man, that was a wild ride, until they moored it with the dutiful canon connections in season two…