Star Trek: Discovery

[nx01a]

So Discovery is going to become Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda? Sentient ship in the far future with a crew looking to restore The Systems Commonwealth or in Discovery's case The Federation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_(TV_series)
It's kind of funny that it's three seasons in and the show is still searching for a premise.

Andromeda was also a show that skipped out almost entirely on its initial premise in its final season.
Trek shows DO change, though, especially in their 3rd seasons. DS9 went from sociopolitical character studies to space battles and war in season 3. Enterprise went from aimless wandering to space battles and war in season 3 followed by finally showing the foundation of the Federation in season 4. TNG got good in season 3, as did Voyager. The biggest shift was in ENT, and I hope the STD shift will be as successful... because it really needs to come with serious A Game to make me not desperately miss Pike and Spock.

Maybe they will run on to Enterprise-J? When the Enterprise-J service time took place?

The 26th Century aka the 2500s.

[ChrisIII]

Hasn't Discovery pretty much arrived at the point that Voyager and Enterprise implied that the Federation/starfleet had normalized time travel? Maybe we'll finally find out who "Future guy" is.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I am just glad that Discovery will be able to do its own thing without being stuck dealing with canon written decades ago. They've got literally hundreds of years to rejigger the galaxy in any configuration they want that allows the show to revisit previously established planets and species without having to worry about what they are supposed to be like.

If you want bald Klingons with too many facial prosthetics for actors to emote through, they can do that without contradicting anything because they can explain it away as something that happened to them a hundred years earlier. If they want to have Vulcans display mental powers far beyond anything we've seen before, they can do that because it's something they started doing after the last time we saw them.

The possibilities for Discovery are now wide open. All they have to do is think through their plots a little bit more, let the rest of the crew actually do more than listen intently to Michael Burnham make absolutely everything about her. Just make a great Star Trek show now that they're unshackled from the creative whiplash the show has undergone the past two seasons.

[Anthony W]

Andromeda was also a show that skipped out almost entirely on its initial premise in its final season.
Trek shows DO change, though, especially in their 3rd seasons. DS9 went from sociopolitical character studies to space battles and war in season 3. Enterprise went from aimless wandering to space battles and war in season 3 followed by finally showing the foundation of the Federation in season 4. TNG got good in season 3, as did Voyager. The biggest shift was in ENT, and I hope the STD shift will be as successful... because it really needs to come with serious A Game to make me not desperately miss Pike and Spock.
The 26th Century aka the 2500s.

Trek shows do grow and evolve, but I'm not seeing that. It feels like the show is just trying on new personas every season trying to see what fits. Yes the biggest shift was in Enterprise but that was the weakest show IMO. I think this show does have a premise.

It's premise is what would happen if a full blown superhero was dropped into the Star Trek universe. Discovery is a superhero show.

Michael Burnham is a superhero. I don't know why I didn't see it sooner. Burnham's story is built more like a superhero origin than a Trek character's history. The way the show itself is set up makes it obvious. Everything is about her. When she isn't in a scene it still manages to be about her in some way. The emotional intensity of every episode is always at 11 yet the characters are never as shocked or angry or sad as they should be, like a comic book. It becomes more obvious once her mom shows up alive. It becomes undeniable once Burnham wears the armor herself. This is Star Trek by way of Marvel Comics, True Believers!

[nx01a]

I came to the same conclusion when Michael kept dropping into the Superheroine Landing Pose during the finale then started flying. :P She became a Tony Stark/The Doctor mashup.

I hope STD finally finds its footing as its own thing instead of relying on the expertly done nostalgia factor that buoyed it in season 2 into something I genuinely wanted to watch every week.

[Charmed]

I don't personally mind the show focusing the brunt of its focus on Michael because 1) I like the character 2) I like the actress 3) I kind of expect them to because she's the main character and 4) Because it is great to see a black woman anchoring a sci-fi series. All that being said, I do want to see the other characters being fleshed out-- especially the ones on the bridge.

[Jokerz79]

Andromeda was also a show that skipped out almost entirely on its initial premise in its final season.
Trek shows DO change, though, especially in their 3rd seasons. DS9 went from sociopolitical character studies to space battles and war in season 3. Enterprise went from aimless wandering to space battles and war in season 3 followed by finally showing the foundation of the Federation in season 4. TNG got good in season 3, as did Voyager. The biggest shift was in ENT, and I hope the STD shift will be as successful... because it really needs to come with serious A Game to make me not desperately miss Pike and Spock.
The 26th Century aka the 2500s.

The TNG got good in Season 3 is a myth I feel an urge to dispute.

Good Season 1 Episodes (A few of these I consider some of the best of the series): Encounter at Farpoint, the Battle, Datalore, 11001001, Heart of Glory, Skin of Evil, Too Short a Season, When the Bough Breaks, and Conspiracy.

OK Season 1 Episodes: Naked Now, Arsenal of Freedom, Angel One (Hey it had Bonnie from Knight Rider nuff said), the Big Goodbye, Where No Man Had Gone Before (I'd call it good if not so Wesley heavy of an episode), and Symbiosis.

Good Season 2 Episodes: Elementary, Dear Data, the Schizoid Man, Unnatural Selection, A Matter of Honor, Contagion, the Measure of a Man (One of the best of the Show), the Icarus Factor, Q Who, and the Emissary. Honorable Mention: the Outrageous Okona (Yeah not that good but Okona was a fun character).

Seasons 1 and 2 were a mix bag Season 2 seemed to have Good and Very Mediocre episodes while Season 1 a wider range from good, to okay, to bad and absolutely horrible like (Code of Honor and Justice). But as a whole Seasons 1 and 2 had a lot of good Trek and don't deserve the whole "TNG didn't get good until Season 3" label it gets.

[Pinsir]

So I finally got around to watching the finale and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though it still really couldn't save the series. Some points;

> Taking the Discovery into the far future is a cool idea and the concept of a Star Trek series set in the far future is fine, but I think it honestly does expose how flawed the initial concept of the show was. That they couldn't work within the space of the timeline they set out, so they are going so far out where they can do whatever the authors want.
> The rogue AI is once again, dumb and how it was defeated was dumb too. Its another repeat of Ultron where his 'main' body is destroyed and that stops the thing in its entirety. Its a cliche concept that was dealt in the most cliche manner.
> The bending over backwards to appease canon nitpickers was a bit much. Anyone who already had problems with it are still complaining and I just don't care.

[Pinsir]

The TNG got good in Season 3 is a myth I feel an urge to dispute.

Good Season 1 Episodes (A few of these I consider some of the best of the series): Encounter at Farpoint, the Battle, Datalore, 11001001, Heart of Glory, Skin of Evil, Too Short a Season, When the Bough Breaks, and Conspiracy.

Datalore is actually a pretty bad episode. It stands out for its 'lore' but Brent Spiner and Will Weaton give some genuinely bad performances and I don't think the rest of the cast does a great job either. There are also some weird writing/directing choices too; in one scene Wesley trusts Data (who actually Lore) and then he suddenly doesn't while on the Bridge.

[Pinsir]

Andromeda was also a show that skipped out almost entirely on its initial premise in its final season.
Trek shows DO change, though, especially in their 3rd seasons. DS9 went from sociopolitical character studies to space battles and war in season 3. Enterprise went from aimless wandering to space battles and war in season 3 followed by finally showing the foundation of the Federation in season 4. TNG got good in season 3, as did Voyager. The biggest shift was in ENT, and I hope the STD shift will be as successful... because it really needs to come with serious A Game to make me not desperately miss Pike and Spock.
The 26th Century aka the 2500s.

DS9 is very consistent in theme and location throughout though, you can watch the pilot and then the final episode and see the links (Prophets, Cardassians, Bajor). The same is true for Enterprise as it doesn't really stray from demonstrating the origins of the Federation. STD already feels very different from S1 to S2 (They downplay a lot of the criticisms fans had with season 1, like the Klingons and the Spore technology) and it will likely feel very different from S3

[nx01a]

Rephrasing... TNG s3 was when the show became consistently good.

DS9 certainly kept its core throughout but it moved from the small, relatively meaningless issues involving Cardassia, Bajor, and the Federation in a small sector of space [even exploring the Gamma Quadrant wasn't very exciting in the first 2 seasons] to making the station and its crew the most important things across 3 quadrants in the midst of an unprecedented in scale interstellar war. The emotional core of the characters and the sociopolitical drama continued but on a much broader and more explosive scale, so I guess I should have said that DS9 expanded more so than changed. It's interesting that s1-2 showed the low key aftermath of (guerilla) war and pillaging while s3-7 actually depict a high octane war.

[Sutekh]

All that being said, I do want to see the other characters being fleshed out-- especially the ones on the bridge.

Totally agree. I had no idea that the robot-looking woman (Airiam) was a human who had been extensively rebuilt after a horrible accident destroyed most of her body until what turned out to literally be her very last episode. It was like, 'Oh crap, we are about to kill this character, and just realized that the fans aren't going to give a crap if we don't give her A) a name, B) some speaking lines, and maybe C) five friggin' minutes of development...'

I particularly want to know more about some of the other bridge crew, including the one with the cyborg eye 'enhancement' (Detmer) and the one with the dreds (Owesekun, the whole 'grew up in a Luddite collective' thing sounds fascinating!). I feel like *some* of the focus on Voq/Ashe, Stamets and Tilly (as well as Michael herself) could go to developing these secondary characters.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I don't personally mind the show focusing the brunt of its focus on Michael because 1) I like the character 2) I like the actress 3) I kind of expect them to because she's the main character and 4) Because it is great to see a black woman anchoring a sci-fi series. All that being said, I do want to see the other characters being fleshed out-- especially the ones on the bridge.

I agree with all of this, but Star Trek's strength has always been in the ensemble. Even the original series didn't lavish this much attention on Kirk. Unfortunately, the first two seasons felt like the kind of show William Shatner wished he was making back in the day. He would have loved if almost every scene was about Kirk or the crews feelings about him.

The greatest innovation of the TNG era was making the show about the crew as much as it was about Captain Picard. The TNG movies suffered greatly because they strayed too far from that and made everything about Picard & Data.

The idea of a superhero Star Trek show is an interesting one that certainly makes this show reflective of where we are culturally, but there are so many good characters on the show that they've utterly neglected in their relentless pace to save the universe every second. The show would only be improved by giving us a reason to know the names of anyone else on the bridge that isn't Suru, Tilly or Stamits.

[Pinsir]

After sleeping on it, what really bothers me about this decision is that, sure, you might have a lot of creative liberties setting the show in the future, but you aren't going to have any previous elements either. DS9 was great because it utilized a lot of the toys established in other series where as Voyager struggled because it had to consistently invent new aliens and the one old element it did have, the Borg, are widely regarded as being overused.

I don't even get this aversion to 'canon', yes, it can be restrictive, but every single post Enterprise media has made allusions to that show. Captain Archer is named dropped in the Reboot film and in S1 of Discovery, not to mention Beyond, the best Star Trek media since DS9 ended, plays heavily with events from that show.

[Cyke]

One thing that's been irking me quite a bit during talks about the show: people not knowing what was intentional from the start. Deep during development the showrunners made no secret that this was to be the Michael Burnham show -- even Wiki and Entertainment Weekly cite her as the central protagonist. Yeah, we can complain that she gets too much attention to the detriment of everyone else on the show (I like the character, but I'm definitely in this camp -- the other bridge crew need work), but there should be no surprise that she's the star. Whether it's executed well or badly is a different topic than what the premise is all about. But saying that "It feels too much like the Michael Burnham Show" would be a complaint if the showrunners advertised the usual Trek ensemble; rather, the showrunners were upfront about Burnham getting the majority of screen time. It's like complaining that Voyager is too far from Starfleet to be a good Star Trek show -- being isolated from Starfleet *is* the show. Is the idea executed well? That we leave up to discussion. Whether it *works* for Trek, if it works well in general or at all, is a different conversation.

The first half of the season didn't even establish a traditional bridge crew -- we had a captain in a supporting role, the engineer, and the XO, and they all revolved around Burnham. The main cast didn't list the senior positions we're accustomed to in Trek, like the MD, operations, or tactical. To me it means they wanted to do something different but didn't know how to go about it, so now we're reverting to a more traditional crew composition. After all, DS9 wasn't totally on the station, but the overall premise still revolved around it.

To that end, I'll go along with a show's premise and accept it as fact. The primary concern then is if that show sticks to its premise or executes that premise well, so that's opinion -- it's certainly done the former, but imo certainly too much to the detriment of the latter. And the show's own internal confusion means it wants to eat its cake and have it, too -- the show putting all that focus on Burnham means no focus on supporting cast, but no concern for the supporting cast means you can't care for them, whereas the show *really* wants us to care for them without doing the work to establish them. So I can accept that the show is "The Adventures of Michael Burnham," but the show revised itself to be "And Co." without really building that part up.

tl;dr: Saying the show is all about Michael Burnham isn't really a critique because that's what it always was. Whether or not the show handles it well *is* a critique.