I think the first season was the best. It was all over the place but it a fantastic ride, and addressed things we had never really seen in Trek before, e.g. fascists in plain sight, and rehabilitation for crimes that hurt almost everyone.
What are you talking about? The first season of TNG is widely hailed as a masterpiece of well written and acted and not even a little bit incredibly racist or sexist episodes!
I stand by my assertion that, if you were to combine both series of Strange New Worlds into a traditional ~20 episode long first season it would be the best first series of any Star Trek show.
I think that you hit the nail on the head when you talk about the serialization of the story. I have some minor complaints about some of the things that the series did (I've never found mirror universe plots terribly interesting, I thought the mushroom drive was kind of dumb, I didn't think it was necessary to tie the main character to Spock, etc), but I'm willing to look past a lot of those things because Star Trek has *always* embraced a certain silliness. But the serialized storytelling killed me. Both in this series and Picard. In a monster-of-the-week style of storytelling, a bad episode is one-and-done---you watch it, roll your eyes, and hope that next week is gonna be better. When you decide to completely serialize a show like this, if the plot doesn't catch you, you have a season to get through. It is very frustrating.
I agree with everything you've said, Alexander. I finally quit watching after Season 3 of Discovery and Season 1 of Picard. I just couldn't take the obviously stretched out serialization.
@@alanpennieyes, though arguably that's less serialized, and more leaving threads for later, plus some multi episode runs. Sort of. Orville is good for a lot of reasons, but smaller stories are a big part of it.
growing up in the 1960s with the original series, I paid no attention, grew up and married a man that was a Star Trek fan, still no interest to learn, but I have to give it to you Steve, you have an amazing way to draw listeners in and make it interesting, I know more about Star Trek now listening to you then I ever intended to know , my husband also thanks you
This is what I've been saying since she was introduced. I don't think there's even a solid 15 minutes of screentime to make "Best Of" youtube compilations with :/ Let alone how much she actually added to the show every single time she DID show up. Pretty sure some of the ensigns have more screen time than THE CHIEF ENGINEER???
I have a feeling that we would have known more about the rest of the ensemble if the writers had paid less attention to crafting the ubiquitous 500-word pontifications, and devoted those 10 minutes per episode letting Owo and Dettmer share some cool tidbits of their lives. Instead, all we get are knowing looks from them while Saru, Pike, or Burnham drone on and on with "I know you're scared, but you're the best damn crew in Starfleet, blah, blah..."
Saru helped me with my anxiety, as I related to him that his fears were a form of lies that even his own mind was telling him. That will always be the legacy of Discovery for me.
Michael Burnham is a rare example of a character that was overdeveloped. She had huge personal arcs in basically all the seasons. No Star Trek character has ever had so much *backstory*. Even in S3, they introduced a whole timeskip seemingly just to give Michael more backstory to explore. And that was a shame, because it meant that she never settled as a character. It's not that I don't know who Michael is, it's that I have five different Michaels who all seem inconsistent with each other, none of whom get to fully just exist for more than an episode or two at a time. Try describing S5 Michael and S1 Michael to a friend who hasn't seen the show, and see if they can guess whether you're describing one character or two.
Well, and I’m okay that she grows and shifts, and ostensibly we see that growth, but like… it sounds ridiculous to say this given HOW MUCH time they devote to trying to have things happen to her and build that growth. But somehow it just never *lands* for me. I’ll have to sit with this awhile, because I feel the elements of characterization were shown more than told, and reinforced through actions and relationships, and we see the beats that believably should lead to the changes she has. She was very well acted. So why doesn’t it work for me? Like it’s okay to change, and the changes are backed up. She’s overpowered but not invulnerable, and it’s very much a part of her character arc that she’s fallible and learns that she is not an island, and learns from her mistakes and learns connection and reliance on others are essential, most of all in leadership. We know what core values she has and sees what drives her. So *WHY* do I still feel like I don’t know this character? Why do I have such fewer touchstones about Pike yet I feel like I know him more? Maybe as you say she’s overdeveloped. Maybe the key is to give you enough that it triggers your own imagination to build a full character and trick yourself into a feeling of “knowing.” Maybe if you get too much spoon-fed, your mind is stuck in data acquisition “wait and see” mode and refuses to smooth in the gaps and create the conceit of “knowing.” I don’t know why that character feels still so much more distant and incomplete than it seems she should. Yeah. I’m gonna need to sit with this awhile.
There was a cumulative effect of the "changes" to the franchise in Star Trek Discovery. As you iterated through them, each on their own wouldn't have caused the fracas we saw from many legacy Star Trek fans, but when combined, we were offered a show that bore little to no resemblance to the beloved franchise many of us had invested a significant amount of time in. Personally, it's hard to express how excited I was that a new live action Star Trek series was lauching. I can remember watching the first few episodes of Discovery and feeling that excitement slowly turn to resentment. Magic mushroom spore drive, navigating giant space tardigrades (LOL), purple marble mouthed Klingons with undecipherable speaking abilities, mutiny by the lead character, unnecessary and preventable death of the first captain, space whales, double hosed pissing, deranged Spock, magical telepathic capabilites of Sarek, breath door locks, smug computer voice, sunlight bathed rooms and corridors, shiny metallic everything sets, lens flares, blue light everywhere, whispering dialog, etc., etc., all added up and created something incredibly unfamiliar. Not to mention the storytelling had completely changed in tone. Gone were big philisophical ideas, moral dilemmas and subtle world building plots. Gone were stories that provoked further thought. Discovery's stories were firnly rooted in surface level absolutes. Each a linear journey where a nemesis must be defeated or a mystery box solved. Each a mini Marvel superhero movie where good and bad are clearly laid out and we root for the heroes because we're told they're the heroes. After watching all 5 seasons, I can count on one hand the times when I was intrigued enough to spend time thinking about the show after it aired. In short, Discovery was NOT Star Trek, at least it wasn't for me. It was something else entirely. All the Gorn skeleton, Tribble, Guardian of Forever fan service and Easter eggs didn't make it Star Trek either. The showrunners used all that to lure in the sizeable audience the franchise had grown over decades, including me. Small wonder there was deep resentment. I think your intepretation of why legacy fans rebelled, cheapens the very real experience many of us had with the show.
I'd need my own hour-long video to refute everything in this video but I think you hit on a lot of points. They changed everything just for the sake of change, making it virtually unrecognizable as Star Trek. This is also why I really can't take arguments like "90's Star Trek was 'made up' and Discovery is 'made up' so stop complaining" seriously. If you are going to make Star Trek, you just have to adhere to a number of principles. Some of which can be bent, but break too many and you end up with Discovery/Picard.
The reason I don’t like the argument that canon can be changed is that if you’re going to change a franchise’s canon, there are only three reasons you would do it: 1) you have envisioned a new canon so genius that it would work perfectly with the franchise’s preexisting ideology, 2) you’re lazy, and you want to create a new canon that’s less challenging to tell stories in, or 3) you have an active grievance against the ideology of the franchise, and want to change the canon to support an ideology that you like. I think Discovery oscillates between number two and number 3. At its best, it was just lazy with canon. At its worst, it had contempt for the ideology of Star Trek and wanted to change everything, just so it could challenge the notions of exceptionalism, duty, chain of command, etc. that the franchise was founded on.
" Each a linear journey where a nemesis must be defeated or a mystery box solved. Each a mini Marvel superhero movie where good and bad are clearly laid out and we root for the heroes because we're told they're the heroes" -- Steve touches on the storytelling, but largely attributes the problem to the pacing of one long story across a whole season - but I agree with you here: the stories themselves sucked. Season Two, the "Red Angel" - instead of a possible genuinely eerie alien red angel, we get yet more Michael Burnham?, spare me please. Then, they go 900 years into the future to destroy a powerful AI but yet have no problem when their ship develops sentience? Season Three set up The Burn, and then whiffed the ending badly (space baby crying???), Season 4 the ending I quite liked, but the path there was really dull. Season five 's story had enough holes to fly an Excelsior-class through, Moll and her offsider were dull, and yet again they whiff the ending, with Michael, "we have this supposedly extremely powerful godlike technology that I've supposedly proven myself to be allowed to use" just basically going "oh well, never mind I don't feel like it".
There are a few things I like about DIS. 1) Takuvma, Lorca, and Empress Giorgio are well written antagonists. 2) The Prime Directive finally getting subsections and guidelines instead of being so nebulous. 3) Saru's people is very fleshed out with an interesting backstory right out of classic Trek.
I do understand your frustration and exasperation with supposed fans who do nothing but very publicly and monetizably bitch about canon, I really do. But the things you love about Star Trek (how it relates to the present day, the emotional truths of its characters and stories, its commitment to presenting an aspirational message) directly result in a huge population of people who are in love with the elements of the show you go out of your way to call out as insignificant window dressing. Emotional investment in the characters and their struggles is going to lead to emotional investment in the secondary world. That's just something we have to manage and express in constructive ways that don't involve death threats to people who are just showing up to do their job where they pretend to live in space, because that's what being a fucking human being is, Jesus Christ. Finally, material criticism of Discovery to keep this screed tethered to the topic at hand, the real reason I'm bothered by Michael Burnham's relationship with Spock is because a large chunk of Spock's (rather limited) characterization and depth in his original appearances was tied to his relationship with his family, and how those relationships interact with his struggles over his Vulcanness and humanity. In Discovery, since the show really isn't about Spock, it never felt to me like Michael fit into that paradigm in an interesting and compelling way, and Strange New Worlds, which is considerably more about Spock, has made it clear that it's not going to bother trying either.
I think my biggest issue with Discovery is that it didn’t lean into what made it great often enough. People complain that it’s too emotional, but I think that was its greatest strength. Instead of giving us moments of building relationships, it felt obligated to having action sequences as much as possible. For example, instead of getting a full Season 4 finale dedicated to the dynamics of making contact with the 10-C, we have to have a high stakes chase with a villain that was honestly never that interesting. In the season 3 finale, Tilly tells a story about how she was depressed on her birthday and Michael just comforted her without mentioning her birthday, but this story is sandwiched into a high stakes action moment instead of being shown to us previously. And of course, the Season 5 timey wimey episode where Michael has a fist fight with herself from the past, in what feels like bold character assassination of Season 1 Michael as wildly irrational. Discovery was at its best when it was feeling, not fighting.
I didn't like Star Trek: Enterprise because Archer was one-note angry all the time (talk about emotional), and I struggled with the beginning of Star Trek: Discovery because Michael was one-note sad/crying. But it became less one-note over time. I like it when series have _emotional range_. I don't mind characters crying; I just wanted to see anger, anxiety, ennui, zen feelings, happiness, etc. too. And, really, they did deliver on that much more as time went on.
It definitely delved too much into violent action schlock and too many times of people putting themselves into stupid amounts of danger. I like action sometimes, but I would have been happier if they had more building tension and more variety in types of action. I think they could have also benefited from lowering the stakes sometimes. Often it was just kind of exhausting to the point I stopped caring about the outcome of events.
It probably was enhanced by my semi-binging over 3 (non-contiguous) days the 5th and final season, and knowing it was the final season… But I was quite annoyed with the extended action sequences with what felt like flourishes with no stakes. It seemed to me like major wastes of time. The aforementioned “Burnham v Younger Burnham” and the long fight with Burnham and Moll. They just felt like (pretty and technically difficult) time fillers. I say no stakes, because Burnham had enhanced protagonist armor by then, as the story required it, so of all the bits I felt could have been a bit hand-waved, like 75% of the time in the fight sequences was an example. Like, I get the “cool” factor, and some of the moments I’m left wishing had been in the series, it was “let’s meet Ariam then kill her” late in the series to go back and shoehorn in instead, but still. Also, this last season to heavily feature Not-Owo** and The Other One on the bridge (sorry; didn’t know them well enough to really care about their characters, no shade to the characters/actors) was annoying. I felt like there was so much more we could have gotten from the “almost-there” characterization with Owo and Dettmer, that investing in them for more screen time and reclaiming a little of that wasted “action sequence” time would have been able to substantially pay off another relationship we “kinda” cared about already. (** not trying to be rude there; it’s just so often in a new cut back to the bridge in S5 would be, whether framing or my ADD-butt attention span, I’d see a glimpse to the left of the bridge and hope we’d be focusing on Owo again, then they’d pan over and it was Not Owo. No disrespect intended, just I really liked Owo and her almost-characterization, and was left with that feeling when I was, in fact, *not* getting more Owo.) There’s likely production-related reasons that make total sense, and the people there did a fine job, but I missed the connection between Owo and Dettmer up there. Maybe they needed to be gone to raise the ship-flying stakes and make it less a given they’d make it, since those 2 already had earned their Plot Amor Badass Skills Badges, but still. Signed, A Person Who Didn’t Know How Much She Wanted More Owo and Dettmer Until She Was Salty She Didn’t Get It.
*I* give a shit about Saru’s rank, because I think he was (is) one of the best Captains in the history of Star Trek. I also liked that Michael was the main protagonist without being Captain, and insisting she replace Saru in later series, I think slightly devalues her character.
I liked it because in a supposedly more egalitarian society, rank shouldn’t be so important. Starfeet officers are such terrible workaholics, and it should absolutely not be glorified. I would want a captain or a boss like Saru, but I would also like more flexibility in roles and responsibilities in a workplace.
@@alanpennie Yeah, if Burnham stayed as a science officer in s2 and became first officer for the rest of the show I think I wouldve liked it more. It would be something new for trek, the main character not being the captain, and would also allow for burnham to grow more comfortable being in command until she gets her own captaincy at the end.
Great review. I am 54 years old and have been watching Star Trek since I was 12. All of the series have good and bad points. I find the good in all of them. Great to see the positive message still going strong.
Great video overall, but I do have to disagree slightly with your view on canon and continuity. To be clear, I'm not as strict on this as I used to be. Production design changes and timeline alterations are inevitable with a long running franchise, and canon can be flexible if it benefits the story. However, Discovery is a new entry in an established franchise, specifically building off familiar events and factions. Maintaining consistent continuity within a story is a basic aspect of fiction because a writer is temporarily maintaining the illusion of a real world. So when Discovery has a lot of really obvious contradictions all at once, it's hard to blame fans who care about canon for being upset. You are right that the story at hand is most important, but to say that canon isn't a valid criticism, or to imply that anyone who has a problem with it is just an irrational whiner, is unfair. (I know that's not what you intended but that's kinda how it came across at times). Then again I'm sure you have dealt with a lot of annoying and irrational fans over the years, so I might be fed up after a while too if that were the case.
One thing that I think Steve never gives a lot of consideration to about the people bitching about canon with respect to Discovery is that in the lead up to the series, there was a *lot* of hay made about how Discovery would be in the non-Kelvin timeline, that it would fit within that canon, and that it would be faithful to that canon. He touches on that here, and obviously the conspiracy theories are ridiculous, but I feel like he undersells how strongly the execs were trying to push those points in order to distance themselves from the Kelvin movies. Even though I don't really care about a lot of things they did, I feel like there's a certain amount of fairness to people feeling like they were bait-and-switched on that point.
The thing about her always being the center of every episode: its that the plot had to bend over backwards to get her in the center all the time. For instance when Adira went down to Trill it makes no sense that she is accompanied by her. Emotionally and medically it should have been Stamets.
The criticism that the show is too Michael-centric is valid. We're Trekkies. We know how ensemble casts work. No one has ever complained about TNG being too Picard-centric (maybe too Data-centric, but not to Michael levels). Even TOS, which really did only focus on its leads, didn't give us all Kirk (or Spock), what he was thinking, and his backstory all the time.
Yes, Steve says "she's the anchor, ensemble shows have an anchor" - then proceeds to tell us that he doesn't really like her as a character, but that "complaining fanboys" shouldn't dislike the show as a whole simply because they also happen to dislike that main character. Especially when said main character in the first two seasons repeatedly did enormously dumb things in the service of the plot and then becomes Captain when Saru is ALREADY the Captain and what's more, a far superior captain than she turned out to be in two seasons! Oh, tying her story in with Spock's turned out just as the "complaining fanboys" feared - a cheap short-hand device to excuse the writers from actually developing a distinct character we'd actually give a monkey's about.
One complaint I’ve seen about Discovery that completely baffles me is the claim that the show’s presentation of society’s prejudices - especially in terms of LGBTQ (and particularly trans rights) - is too “in your face” compared to older Trek shows. Um, the original series depicted the ignorance of racism by having the last 2 members an entire species - whose faces were painted literally half black and half white - fight to the death. This aired at the height of the Civil Rights movement when peaceful protesters were being beaten in the streets… And DISCOVERY is the “in your face” Trek show?! Holding a mirror up to society and commenting on its uglier and shameful areas has ALWAYS been the core of Star Trek. If anything, Discovery depicted its LGBTQ characters as completely ordinary people, which is the WHOLE POINT of setting aside the trivial differences between people and living together harmoniously. Great video, Steve! Thank you for your work… your videos are often the highlight of my day 😁
I can sympathise with certain points (such as having politicians appear in the show) being a bit on the nose, but equally I think you're right and that people are ascribing an artifice to Trek that it never really possessed: the TOS episode where they play the "The USA evolved independently on this planet card" springs to mind. If these people want a show that really lost its way in effectively weaving moral messages into its plot they should really watch series 10 of Doctor Who where, on multiple occasions, the characters more or less turn to the camera in the middle of the plot to explain the moral of the story as if the audience are 5 year olds (I'm possibly being a little unfair but it's much worse than in most of the prior series bar the first one from 1963) 😊.
Uh yeah. That's the part they don't like. They're pretending it's actually obnoxious representation because they're uncomfortable with the normalization of forcefully repressed people with minority statuses.
This show relaunched Trek and ends with 15 more episodes than megahit Stranger Things and four direct spinoffs (Short Treks, SNW, Section 31, and Academy). We have it to thank for the explosion of new shows and breaking the format for what a Trek show can be. Even though DS9 is my favorite, and even though it's a hybrid crew of Starfleet, Bajoran militia, and civilians, even that show was basically about a captain and crew in all the standard positions. Discovery declared that the show could have an unstable captain's seat. We can go three years without knowing who the CMO or chief engineer are. We can follow the redemption of one character across two ships and the underdog lower decks crew she befriends along the way. We can normalize wearing a heart on one's sleeve as fuel for doing a better job, instead of seeing crying as a weakness. Diversity is super strong with this show. Burnham went from someone seeing her parents ripped from her, being raised by Sarek and Amanda (stunting her emotional growth), being cold and emotionless at first, coming out of her shell, having a maverick martyr complex, then learning to be more transparent and deliberate, and finally commanding by gently leading others away from the kinds of mistakes she used to make. Season four was a stand-out as a hard sci-fi riff on "The Devil in the Dark," with shades of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters, The Abyss, Contact, and Arrival, showing rigorous data gathering and communication in good faith winning out over preemptive strikes borne of vengeance and fear. It also showed the value of restorative justice. It's a show that made no apologies about wearing its heart on its sleeve and I absolutely adored it for that reason. It took Troi's advice to Data "that emotions aren't good or bad; it's what you do with them that counts" and showed how empathy is the absolutely essential fuel in the fight for justice, not a weakness to be pitied. Supporting that theme, every season brought on new mentors that were experts in psychology and emotional intelligence: Cornwell, Pike, Vance, Rillak, as well as promoting Culber to counselor and employing the services of Dr. Kovich. The show dared to shift focus away from senior officers on a Starfleet posting, by focusing on one person's growth from grief-stricken maverick with a martyr complex to someone who learns to move past that by being more transparent and deliberate, and gently guiding people away from the kinds of mistakes she used to make. I'd rank the seasons from best to good: 4, 3, 5, 1, 2. Season one showed how peace can only be achieved through good faith. Season two showed how we can seek forgiveness and reconciliation for the past. Season three showed how connection is essential. Season four showed how the arduous work of reaching out to the seemingly implacable foe is an essential counter to the flailing preemptive strikes borne out of grief, a pretty full circle thematic tie. And season five showed the wisdom of not wielding too much power. No matter what show is your favorite from the current era, you have Discovery to thank for it. No longer were shows constrained to the same formula. Star Trek is so much bigger than any one format. DSC's focus on underdogs meant that we could have a show about people who left Starfleet in PIC, a show about a quartet of ensigns at the beginning of their career in LDS, a show with young people who never even heard of Starfleet or the UFP, and a show that fills in the blanks in the transition period between Pike and Kirk. It also birthed Short Treks, which was a great testbed for new Trek concepts. I'm looking forward to see what new kinds of Star Trek shows we'll see in the future. There's already talk about a Section 31 show (Will that be about how that organization finds redemption?) and an Academy show. But I'd like to challenge Star Trek to branch out even more than it has during this era. Let's see what the Star Trek future is like from the perspective of civilians. Let's see what it's like to live planetside. DS9 showed we could do a space station to critically acclaimed results. That said, I'm completely agnostic on the format for any Trek show. It could center on one character or dozens of characters. It could be heavily serialized or be completely an anthology, with zero returning characters from week to week. It could be a sitcom, a political thriller, a mystery series, a musical, a legal drama, a show about a suburban family, a variety show, a talkshow, a sketch comedy show, public access, a vlog, or be made up entirely Federation Council C-SPAN. The more different each Trek show is from previous Trek shows, the better. As far as I'm concerned, Trek is a philosophy, not a genre or format. As long as it's about a diverse group of seemingly implacable foes learning to communicate in order to solve problems in a post-artificial economy in which everyone's needs for survival are met without means testing, then I'm happy.
Honestly I really disagree with your take about the aesthetic continuity of Discovery. It's true that a lot of the complaints about the aesthetics of the show were blown out of proportion, but if you're making a show that is meant to slot directly into a pre-existing timeline then it should look like it belongs there. If you want to make a show with complete artistic Liberty then you shouldn't set it into a setting with pre-established continuity. I would have absolutely loved to see an aesthetic that's blending between the original series Starfleet and the Starfleet of Star Trek Enterprise, but instead it just feels like Starfleet randomly decided to adopt the aesthetic of the Abrams verse for less than a decade and then immediately go back, it just doesn't make sense.
Disco's first season is one of my favourite seasons of NuTrek. Insanely happy memories of watching it week by week when it released. Each season walked back more and more of what made it unique and interesting, but even at it's worst ( _cough_ season two _cough_ ) it was still damn good.
My wife and I are huge star trek fans and really looked forward to this show, but outside of a few episodes it really was just kind of boring. The stories were back loaded, everything important happened in the season finales and the rest of the time was spent with the characters in awkward group therapy sessions and episodes that felt like filler meant to waste our time. Almost the entirety of Discovery and Picard s2 were the only times on Star Trek where I legit was just bored out of my mind wondering how much longer the episode had. Saru is honestly the only character I liked at all, well him and Linus 😂
I LIKED Saru too and that robot girl,she had an episode where she appeared just to be killed off and i was miffed.Discovery had amazing sets and CGI,but,story -wise,it was lacking.
@@kerry-j4m There was a later episode with some time travel back to when she was still alive, and she got to learn how she would die, came to accept it.
I enjoyed the first 3 seasons of DIS, it was the fourth and fifth seasons where I felt episodes dragged on with little consequence. The whole middle of PIC season 2 was also like that, I enjoyed the first 3 episodes, then a bunch of nothing episodes in the middle, then an okay final episode.
“Professional grievance merchant” is both an excellent name for a band and the perfect way to describe what some of these folks are. I wish they weren’t so ubiquitous.
Excellent band name, or franchise episode: "Indiana Jones and the Ubiquitous Professional Grievance Merchants" "Harry Potter and the Ubiquitous Professional Grievance Merchants"
I think Disco moving to the 32nd century was the best thing for it. No more crow-barring in legacy characters, no more needing to try to fit things into existing continuity, etc... And we met a few really cool new characters, like Federation President Rillak and the riddle that is Kovich. BTW, Kovich is played by legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg. I remember first seeing him, and going, "Wait... is... is that David Cronenberg?!" And then he was on the show for three freaking seasons! I love Saru. Doug Jones is a national treasure, and I'm so glad he got to have major role like this, even if he was under a ton of makeup. And Saru's journey is so much more interesting than Burnham's. In fact, Disco is one of those shows were the "main character" is probably my least favorite. I like her ok, but I prefer Saru, Tilly, Stamets, Culber, and Reno. Reno's and Stamets' interactions were so awesome! And Stamets and Tilly. BTW, I love that Tilly's actress gained weight, and she was still on the show until the end. Fuck yeah. I will say; I agree with you, Steve, about the show being episodic. But then, I feel that way about a lot of shows these days... soooo tired of 8-10-13+ episode story arcs. Plus, I think episodic series can do character-based episodes better. Cuz, ya, I'd have loved to see more of Detmer and Owosekun. d-:
Star Trek Discovery is a work of fiction set in a pre-established period (or close enough) of a larger fictitious world. It is, by virtue of this, a period piece. I think what illustrates the ridiculousness of Discovery’s decisions is this: Lord of the Rings is 100% a work of fiction set in a fictionalized time period. If the Council of Elrond was held on a Zoom call over I-pads, a lot of people would have been miffed. Many would have been cheezed if Legolas was given a modern pistol instead of his traditional bow. It’s all fake but there should be consistency in both the world in public perception. Maybe people wouldn’t care about Elrond using an I-Pad and that’s fine. Lots of people don’t care about things but that doesn’t make the people who do care wrong. We shouldn’t confuse our own disinterest in a thing with the belief that it is not worth the interest.
More than that, imagine if you took literally any other movie, changed nothing about it but slapped the words Star Trek onto it: - Star Trek: Braveheart - Star Trek: Titanic - Star Trek: Citizen Kane - Star Trek: Avengers: Endgame It would be absurd. I think if you did this, even Steve would have to admit that there's something to the worldbuilding or the themes or *something* beyond just the story being told that makes Star Trek Star Trek. I agree with most of his actual critiques of the franchise, and the more reactionary elements of the fanbase. But his dismissal of the non-storytelling elements always strikes me as really dismissive of the craft that goes into building sets, costuming, makeup, prop design, script supervision, editing, etc... They matter and it's fair to critique them for what they bring to the final product or take away from it.
I watched Disco seasons 1 & 2 a year ago, and this video perfectly encapsulates everything that frustrated me : a lot of lovable characters, some really touching episodes, but the writers and the cameras made everything possible to never focus on the really good ideas the show had...I might start again soon, then finishing seasons 3, 4 & 5, this time not focusing on what frustrated me, but on what I loved on it...I hope it will be enough, because there's a lot to love in Disco, it's just that Disco doesn't want me to love these things...
I'm also realising : Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds to a certain extent (Pike, M'Banga, La'an, Chapel and Ortegas a bit, even Uhura) are shows focusing on trauma. Kurtzman live action era is focusing on the traumas of its characters, but I'm not able to understand why. Any ideas ? (I'm not all that familiar with other Trek shows, I'm currently into TNG/DS9, I finished STLD, haven't finished yet TOS, but with the exception of DS9 (occupation trauma, death of his wife...), this have never been Star Trek focus...)
@@guillaumet1327 It's a Kurtzman thing. He thinks it reflects the reality of the young folks watching this Trek. He's hoping they'll find it relatable. It's not the kind of optimism traditional Trek has focused on but the characters do work through it and it does show that just because you went through some shit, you can still go on to some kind of happy and productive life and that you don't have to have your future 100% defined by your past.
@guillaumet1327 other commenters points but also trauma was something older trek struggled to deal with due to being so episodic (some exceptions of course) so it's something new trek which can remember what happened last week can explore more.
The execution was crap. Writing was generally crap. Loved Stamets and Culber. Gray was just intolerable (can’t tell if it was the actor or the writing…pending a rewatch). Adira was meh… Mudd’s episode was fun. Michael’s progression felt unearned at times…just seemed like her actions would preclude her from making captain. There were some strong points for Michael…again I think it was the crap writing. All around it was just horribly inconsistent in quality on most fronts. Oh, and the “insert galactic threat here” season spanning arc for seasons 2-5 was tiring…the Klingon War could have been better and more interesting if it had been given room to breathe over more than one season. I’ll note I loved that shuttle ride in the beginning when they perfectly timed the uncut shot with the noted distance and warp factor (suck it, Abrams).
Would love to see a video on the whole Lower Decks controversy regarding Discovery as canon. My thought is love or hate the show, Strange New Worlds can’t happen without this show as canon.
Hell I remember when Next Generation came out and some people lost their minds. I love the original because it reminds me of my dad who is no longer with us and I was leery of STNG but grew to love it, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as well. I don't get paramount so I haven't seen Picard or Discovery but I I'm sure I will and I look forward to the day I do!! By the way I'm really glad I found your site, I really enjoy your take on Trek and agree with your politics.
One of the strangest thing about modern Star Trek writing for me, is that it echoes itself. Sure, they course corrected and brought back Culber, but they also did the same thing again with Gray. DISCO S2, PIC S1, and LD S1 all had robotic space tentacles. PIC S1 and LD S1 both end with Riker saving the day. A lot of these "echoes" are minor, but when you add them to the occasional story beat or set piece that is almost-too-close to another Sci-Fi story or cinematic universe, and it really becomes noticeable.
The critique: “I wish the show maintained a better visual and thematic consistency with previous series, and that the characters on that show displayed a greater degree of professionalism befitting of their roles” The response: “SHUT UP NERD”
Currently rewatching TOS, only 5 episodes in and so far we've got: - The third canonical episode uses uniforms from The Cage, which are never seen again. - Janice Rand has been sexually harassed or assaulted nearly every episode with 0 apologies, Spock even implying that she probably liked it - Bridge officers publicly joke about their past sexual exploits Professionalism and consistency are in very short supply in this show, I think we tend to have selective memories with some of the things that happen in this show. That even extends to TNG and DS9 era, I wouldn't call playing a prank by having your boss pick up a sex invitation on vacation to be very professional.
Didn't know that. But I kinda agree. I always roll my eyes when Michael starts giving some inspirational speech and her eyes start to water and stuff. It isn't anything terrible, but I'm still a bit annoyed by it.
Except it's a valid point this time, since the big, emotional reaction in the finale that's supposed to hit you like a train is instead just one of many. That said, it's hardly the biggest problem the show has, and since it was filmed alongside the next season, not much will change anytime soon. Doesn't really "ruin" the show, as some claim.
While I'm not much of a fan of nuTrek (with the exception of Lower Decks which is more of a lighthearted animated lark), I *DO* appreciate that Discovery in particular increased the diversity in the casting of Trek actors and stepped up on representation for marginalized groups. The shows are still not my bag (with the aforementioned exception), but I will give credit where credit is due.
I won't give them credit for this and it is not 'due'. Filling your cast with as many diversity checkboxes isn't some stunning and brave thing to do, no matter how smug you boast about it afterwards in interviews. We've had black female ADMIRALS in Star Trek in the 90's and no one made a big song and dance about it. Make better Star Trek, instead of going through a DEI checklist and parading them around.
It was just bad. You're right to dismiss the rabid regressives and the banality brigade that were mad about lore inconsistencies, aesthetic etc. But it just had nothing to offer. To me, anyway. Interesting but also astounding to hear such a measured and reasonable take from someone that views the show so positively. I earnestly appreciate the opinion. As for me, I hope the legacy is to be forgotten or reacted strongly against. I always said that the serialization was the biggest issue. But there were certainly others. Maybe you're right and my notion of Star Trek is too fixed. SNW is a huge improvement but still inferior to Voyager in my opinion. I hope they come up with something good in a decade or so.
it is a shock visually and maybe a little tonally, Steve's analysis is a pretty good and you sort of have to see where they were headed in a story, even if they didnt reach it.
@@twitchew I was never shocked by the look.... what people forget is that OUR tech and design quality has improved a lot since the 60's. Did people really expect things to look as cheap and bland as TOS just because it's set around that time period? It may be set before/around the TOS era in universe, but it's still a modern Trek show with modern visuals.
Other matters aside, the whisperibg of dialog in this series irritated me no end. My favorite character was Reno, both for the actor's scripting and performance, and for delivery of her lines in a normal voice, without Emotional Music overlaid in the background (which was also a persistent and annoying distraction).
After season one, I bailed. I checked in a few times but clearly there was not enough on the menu to make me sit down and eat. This is a great overview, Steve, and I thank you for doing it, but I'm not sorry I skipped 90% of Discovery, and would give anything to have back the hours I wasted on the first season.
Another excellent Star Trek video; thank you, Steve! You expertly, fairly, and perfectly encapsulated all of the things that worked and didn't work about Discovery, and reminded me - yet again - why I consider you a voice of reason among the online Star Trek community.
Internal inconsistencies: at what level does it start to matter to you? Would inconsistencies in a particular episode matter to you? Or would it have to be within a scene? After all, at each level "it's just fiction!". A lot of the time the folks who get all upset at inconsistencies between series (or episodes) are making too much noise for the scale of the problem, but similarly a lot of the times the inconsistencies come across as carelessness or as a misuse of artistic preferences. (Note: I haven't seen any Discovery or Strange New Worlds because Paramount decided they wanted a smaller audience and put them behind paywalls.)
I unironically love the new Klingon designs. Something I really liked in Discovery is that after 30 years of Star Trek turning the Klingons into cuddly almost comic relief characters based around the single joke of seeing everything as a war, Discovery suddenly reminded us that actually these guys are monsters. Redesigning them to look more alien and startling is the shock the franchise needed to get us to see them differently (ha!)
I really enjoyed this review. Although I disagree with your tepid view of later seasons and of Michael Burnham, you discussing how Discovery's main cast is based across the ship (thereby giving less space to bridge crew characters) was especially informative for me looking back on the show, and for drawing threads between the 23rd & 32nd C. eras I remember as two different shows in my head.
Gotta disagree with you on the presentation and inconsistencies. Props, sets and costumes are all important storytelling tools that ground a fictional world in a specific time and place. You wouldn't put a cell phone prop in a 1930s noir. The production artists on TNG, DS9 and Enterprise all worked really hard to design material that fit with and expanded the fictional world in believable ways. That's not trivial. For some of us, that stuff is a core part of the appeal of sci-fi. Discovery's art direction gave up on that work in favor of looking superficially cool. If they didn't want to keep track of those details or make something that looked like that era then they shouldn't have made yet another prequel.
I dislike Discovery for several reasons and gave up on the show after season 3 BUT there are several aspects and characters I love. - Saru: One of the best characters in all of Trek - Our first on screen gay couple, Stamets and Culber were great. - Tilly is a delight and her bubbly excitement is relatable af. - Without Discovery we wouldn't have SNW which is in my top 3 Star Trek shows.
I think Burnham was a better character when she was more Vulcan oriented like she was in the first season. It was very unique having a human raised on Vulcan.
I found her emotional outbursts far more moving when she was "Vulcan" Burnham and suspected the personality change that happened from episode 2 of season 3 was done to answer criticisms of her. I don't think they realised that a lot of the criticisms may have SAID it was about her character.... but it was something else. Fast talking intense Burnham was an interesting person I wanted to know, the later one was a likeable enough character that I dealt with in order to see the people I actually engaged with.
4:39 my wife never got into the show. The look of the Klingons took her out entirely and she had no time for it. I would watch and each time she would say “what is that?” Me “a Klingon.” Her “oh riiiiiight. That’s really distracting for me, I am sorry.” Me: “no worries” She’s been fine with strange new worlds
Poor storytelling and no screen time for the other cast members,whom I wanted to know more about and have stories built around them.Like TNG did in their 3rd season.
I wish I could give this video more likes. I really enjoyed this show and I appreciate how it was able to reboot Star Trek on TV but you really captured all of my complaints as well.
Discovery was my introduction to Star Trek and as such will always be the series i come back to. The characters are like family to me and rewatching old episodes feels like coming home
Great video! The thing I disagree with the most is about Burnham. I think we do know Burnham quite well, but the person that is is a profoundly weird one shaped by the twin traumas of her youth. She is a character who exists in tension with the violent deaths of her parents and the subsequent emotional abuse (or something very like it) from Sarek. This is a person who tried so hard to *be* a Vulcan to try, because the well of Vulcan reserve might be the only thing that can push the pain away. To the extent to which she is a cipher, it's as a defense mechanism. It's only in Season 3, when Book shows her that openness is a better path, that feeling her pain is the only way that she can truly move on, where she gains a measure of serenity she tried so hard to get from the Vulcan philosophy she clung to.
Not for nothing, she is very much a Peak TV-era Protagonist. In many ways, the question "Who is Michael Burnham?" is the central question of the show in the same way "Who is Don Draper?" is for Mad Men.
I think the show improved a lot as it got into later seasons. The writers seemed to respond to fan criticisms, such as Michael being too good at everything. Most of the bridge crew, although diverse, could have been cardboard cutouts. I didn't care for Tilly, but I'm fine that others did like her. Maybe I'm too old school sci Fi geek, but the science in the show was lacking for my taste too. Towards the end some of the episodes felt like i was watching the CW with the amount of interpersonal drama that felt a little unearned. I didn't care about adira and grey's relationship. I don't know if it was the acting or if it was just undeveloped. Today's Star Trek needs better writers!! But all in all, glad the show got made.
I wish we lived in the alternate timeline where Kurtzman had left and Bryan Fuller had been put in charge. Sure, maybe we wouldn't have gotten 'Strange New Worlds' but given Fuller's track record I truly believe we would have gotten more consistency in the series we did get. Instead of one good show and a bunch of average to terrible seasons of TV I think we'd be sitting here feeling better about everything we got whatever it was.
Disco's pilot was my favourite of all of the Trek series. A XO mutiny so that the optimal outcome was achieved was an amazing opening. It's a shame it went on a wild ride since then. Season 1 was the best and it gradually got worse as time went on. I stopped in the middle of season 4, I was fatigued, and Prodigy and Lower Decks were satisfying my Trek needs.
The problem I had with the Klingon redesign wasn't that it was different. I cried tears of joy when I saw the Enterprise redesign. The problem isn't change, the problem is that the elements that Steve dismisses (makeup design, costuming, set design, etc) *are* part of the storytelling. They are decisions made with the intent of communicating meaning about some element of the story being told. And when it comes to Discovery's Klingon redesign I think what they were trying to accomplish was to racialize and otherize the Klingons. The real-world history of the Klingons started with a culture that seemed foreign and savage to the Federation, whose morals are meant as a stand-in for the audience. But over time, as we got to know Klingon culture through TNG, DS9 and a little bit of VOY and ENT, we come to a cultural understanding of them whereby their differences are celebrated instead of viewed as untrustworth or disgusting. When DSC wanted to make the Klingons villains again, it had the makeup team basically turn them into orcs: Making them look more brutal, frightening, and harder to empathize with so that the audience won't empathize with them as much. Discovery's pilot starts strong with T'Kuvma delivering a really interesting critique of Federation values, akin to the famous root beer scene with Quark and Garak, but then abandons it faster than Voyager abandoned its starting premise and had them become instantly irredeemably evil and I think that decision lacked the nuance that Klingon culture had been treated with throughout the TNG-era shows. It was done in the name of the story, but it did a disservice to the themes of the franchise vis-à-vis tolerance and cultural understanding - themes which later seasons of Discovery did a much better job of embracing.
Season 1 is when I really tried to get emotionally involved with all the new stuff, the serialized storytelling, the new direction, the Klingon war, the mystery of Lorca, only be completely disappointed. They completely squandered the first half of the season by turning Lorca into a cartoon bad guy. They squandered the entire season by resolving the war in such a nonsensical way. And it was only as bad as it was because it was serialized, and the entire season relied on these things to hold together. After that, I didn't get invested as much. Did it get better? Yes. Did it get good? No.
“The show revolves around Michael Burnham” is a problem that my partner and I have with the show, and not because she’s the protagonist but because she’s the only one who gets to be right or do things. And I’m not saying that it’s “not Star Trek” since it’s a lot more similar to the Original Series and Kirk in that regard, but when I watch TNG, one of my favorite things is how Picard doesn’t instantly know the right answer. One of the ways we learn about the other main/recurring characters is when Picard says, “Ok, we have a problem. What should we do?” And everyone goes around giving their advice about it, which Picard listens to. Burnham was competent and proved correct so often in ways I just didn’t find interesting. I’m still not sure what the lesson of the “Vulcan hello” mutiny was. Because it seemed like Burnham was correct about the warlike Klingons, but then punished for it. And the only difference with the rest of the show is she stopped being punished for being right all the time. I really dislike Discovery. I just never enjoyed watching it despite liking lots of things about it, like the jump into the future. That was a really brave shakeup of the status quo. Having a fully sentient ship was really interesting. The main “villain” species of Season 4 was a neat idea. But nothing seemed to matter compared to Michael Burnham’s personal story, which, to me, came at the expense of everything else. It’s nice that Burnham found love in the 32nd century, but why was everyone else still part of the crew instead of grieving the effective deaths of everyone they’d ever known? Why didn’t the ship being capable of solving every problem they had come up more often? I liked the look of the show a lot, but I would have loved to have had 20-30 episodes a season with this cast where we got to live with them and get to know them in much lower stakes. I like ensemble shows, and I like when the concerns are something more genuine than “the fate of the galaxy”. On the bright side, the fanfic writers are going to be eating for generations off of trying to fill in things about this show the canon never showed us.
my only real issue with the 'new' klingons is that they sounded like they were talking with a mouthful of cotton and pebbles - after a few epis i think they modified the prosthetics a bit, and the actors got more used to them, and then they sounded a lot better to me.
Do you believe the federation was too easy on Picard for Wolf 359. 11,000 dead. Ensign Ro was tried for the deaths of 8. Tam Elbrun for the deaths of 47. Shouldn't there have been thousands that blamed Picard like Sisko? Wasn't a trial in order? Or did Picard have huge political clout that allowed him to avoid it. I would love to hear your opinion.
I've briefly dicsussed this before. I liked the first two seasons of Discovery. My only complaints about it is they tried to cram too much story into too little time, and it could've benefitted from better pacing. But once they got into the future, the show just completely lost me. I found the future setting incredibly uncompelling. I just couldn't get into it at all. They pretty much discarded all the stuff about the show that interested me. Suspension of disbelief is a BIG thing in fiction, and while I was able to do it for the first two seasons, the third season onward I couldn't at all. It didn't feel like Star Trek at all...if it felt like anything I'd say it felt more like Andromeda (which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a dramatic shift for this show). I stopped watching very quickly, and these days I consider the first two seasons a sort of prequel to Strange New Worlds, which I really like so far. Except for the Lower Decks crossover episode...I despise that series. While they did the best they could on the SNW episode with the material, any reference to Lower Decks is too much for me. I personally think that while serialized storytelling is a good thing, and events should matter beyond the episode they happen in, not every single episode has to be part of an ongoing story. The best shows benefit from both serial stories AND standalone stories. They just need to make sure that they don't do the status quo thing where things that happen in an episode never matter again.
As someone who didn't like Discovery at the start , and didnt care for a good chunk of season 1, I did end up enjoying it a lot. However, cant say I share the same opinion of Burnam. Out of all the characters, she felt the most flat, uninteresting, and I have to respectfully disagree and say her char felt completely inauthentic and didnt believe any of her characters relationships with others. She didn't work for me. At all. Meanwhile Culber and Stamets worked fantastically together and with their colleagues. Imo, the standouts of the show. My one disappointment was probably Owosekun. When she got her own episode I was hoping for more for her character throughout the series and was disappointed with how little we got. I feel like she had a lot more potential that wasn't followed up on. Same feeling about Detmer.
S1 was superb. Really well written. Should stuck to that style and tone. Season 3 started really well but the whole burn resolution being rushed spoiled the end. Should have left the burn as an ongoing mystery, focused on trying to spread the hope of a rebuilt Federation, and all the story opportunities of a post-burn galaxy that they set-up S3:E1-2. They also changed Burnham way too much. Her character was more interesting with all the fast talking Vulcan traits while discovering her humanity. Season 2 is great because of Pike and Spock. But the Red Angel thing always felt contrived. Never explained why the ship can’t just come back to their century. Control is destroyed so what’s the issue? Other than because that’s what the plot says. And of course, they needed to give the crew some more character development. They needed their own lead episodes.
It's wild how they not only decided for an entire season to be a fan service-y follow-up to a TNG episode but specifically a TNG episode that was made to be a fan service-y answer to a pedantic nit-picky fan question that kept popping up back in the day, which was "Why do all the aliens look like humans?" The real answer to this being "Someone decided that depicting aliens through make-up was the best way to go", but that wasn't good enough, so they made an episode with a big reveal answer to that question to which even the characters that witnessed it basically said "Well that's nice to know, I guess. Get ready to be asked this at Trivia Night" Also I'm surprised you had nothing to say about either version of Philippa Georgiou in this video
23:03 Come on. You can not be serious. The writing of its characters was absolutely a gigantic flaw Why was Burnham literally Captain I can do anything and everything Episode after episode she would come with the solution to some impossible problem immediately.Then she would proceed to execute it better then anyone else could ever do it Not forgetting to occasionally display the hand to combat skills of a Marvel character Shout out to comic character Emperor Georgiou and her ability to also beat up or murder a room full of people like no other Star Trek character ever Also, so many other characters were completely void of charisma Tilly being the prime example. I mean she has you pining for Barclay, Kes or Polaski every time she came on I mean yes the storytelling was also horrible. Not helped by silly dead end ideas like the spore drive and the burn But the characters man. Completely garbagio
We all stan Saru. I want to see him on Star Trek: Academy. At least as a guest lecturer. Jones brings such depth to him. One issue that many of the latest generation of Trek has is that the stakes are always huge. The existence of the federation/humanity/all life. I want to see different levels of challenges. The more episodic structure of Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks helps with both characterization and the scope of the plot.
The trouble with such huge stakes is that they're hard to relate to. I was more involved when previous series threatened the entire ship's crew with death (TOS) or had all the children kidnapped by a nearby planet (TNG) or could be responsible for war between two allied species (ENT).
Discovery has some of my favorite characters in the franchise, and some excellent episodes. I really wish they had been able to pace out season story arcs better than they did... It's why I prefer a show like SNW that's gone for a *mostly* story of the week focus. It's why one of my favorite series ever is Babylon 5 that had major story arcs, including one for the entire series, but was mostly filled with story of the week episodes.
Your whole thing in the beginning of the video about continuity errors and just rolling with it reminds me of all the BS I hear in The Legend of Zelda game fanbase regarding continuity errors between the games, even with the LoZ creator making an "offical" timeline! The nitpicking and endless obsession with details can really ruin an experience with a legacy fanbase. Funny enough, it was Discovery that got me hardcore into Star Trek, despite its own flaws, I loved the bold new take Discovery took on the Trek verse. When I watched thru episodes of TNG, watched all of DS9, and currently watching Voyager, I actually can see how Discovery fits, in its own weird, special way in the verse and its amazing. And I would argue Discovery along with DS9 had some of the best story arcs and character developments in the Trek series. Thank you for this video man. ❤
I think this was a very fair review of Discovery. I really loved the series despite its flaws, and I wish we could have had it around a little longer because I really wanted to give them a chance to have that perfect season that didn't have those pacing issues described. I really hope some of these beloved characters from Discovery will show up on the new Starfleet Academy spin-off series. Tilly in particular is perfectly positioned to be at least reoccurring on it.
My biggest complaint was the showing vs. telling you mentioned and also the sets. The production values were... Sad. Nothing felt like a set. Everything seemed meaningless. I was watching three people use sandbikes to escape an avalanche and felt nothing. It's *so* hard to feel any stakes at all when every room just looks like a series of greenscreen objects and forced perspective. There's nothing tactile, for so much of the show.
I didn't like, how the klingons looked, when I first watched discovery and I still don't like their look. But when I first watched discovery, I was wondering about what it was, that I don't like about the klingons look. I asked myself for the reason why, and that sure is always a good way for enlightenment: to question oneself. So I thought, I didn't like the look of the klingons in discovery, because they looked too unfamiliar, indeed they looked to ALIEN to me. And then I thought, that exactly that point I brilliant. The show managed not only that the klingons looked alien to the characters of the story, but that I myself felt alien towards them. So the show established, that the klingons looked truely alien to me, and that is a great accomplishment. I still don't like the look of the klingons in discovery, but if they would look as sweet and familiar as little sweet kitten, they wouldn't be klingons anymore, would they?
Years before this series aired, Bryan Fuller's previous creations, Dead Like Me and Pushing Daises were personal favorites. Knowing he started as a Trek writer and long-time fan, I hoped he would get a shot at the reboot. I got close to getting what I wanted, and what I think the show needed. If they wanted to set it near the Kirk era, they needed someone at the helm who knew that show well. But he's also known as a creative showrunner with his own style. Removing him was a mistake, in my opinion. But that's the timeline we live in.
Well, I'm just now watching Discovery, so I'm going to bail out of this video early for now. Having just watched the first two seasons, I must admit they are both a mess. The acting and production values are excellent, but the stories and the writing are just bad. I recall that TNG struggled with writing the first season and a half, so perhaps things were settling down on Discovery, but I'm spending a lot of time shaking my head at story choices. The killing of the doctor is just one of many really bad decisions. Bringing him back in such a "The Search for Spock" sort of way caused me to question why they killed him and not some sort of other temporary character. And just don't get me started on Tilly. Lovely character, but she was involved in every solution. Is a cadet the only crew member who has spare time to work on the spore drive? I'm just reminded that Ronald Moore said that he couldn't make all the pieces of the story work in the finale of BSG and the characters were what was important. No Ron, the story is important too. And it is important for Discovery too.
If the look of the Klingons didn't matter, why did the Berman era runners make such a big point of squaring the difference between TOS Klingons and movie/TNG Klingons? I agree that I can live with differences in makeup and tech...except on the tech front, the Berman era (Enterprise) went to great lengths to make the tech look consistent with TOS. So, while I appreciate that this doesn't matter to some, it does matter to many, and it matters enough that showrunners dealt with it previously, and anyone who was going to deal with newer series should have been aware of that and not allowed it to throw them off-pace.
I expect literature to be consistent and to avoid contradicting itself. We forgive Tolkien his relatively occasional continuity gaffes, but overall we expect him to remain faithful to what he's already put on paper. I don't think it's too much to ask people in film and television to do the same thing. If you're going to write a sequel, or a prequel, you should be prepared to be bound to what's come before and build on it. You should not come in and declare the previous canon to be irrelevant, or worse crap, and continue the story without respect for what's come before. That's a long preamble, but I agree with you wholeheartedly.
@@darlabenz3097 Mostly agree, except with something like Star Trek, unlike Tolkien (a single person), you're dealing with multiple people with multiple ideas on this, that and the other.
I found the first five episodes of season 1 for me to be very exciting and fresh. I liked that it was written as a tightly plotted "novel for television" set in the Star Trek universe without a comfortable status quo to fall back on. I liked that it focused on a character very different in her position and circumstances than anyone we'd seen in Star Trek before. I liked the sense of real danger in Lorca's amorality and the foreign-subtitled, very alien Klingons. I liked the mysteries and the theorizing they invited. I wish I could have seen more of that show. I gave up on the show midway through season 2, because I felt like it didn't have any of that focused intent anymore and was just kind of wasting my time with overlong meandering stupidity.
If it's so important to someone that the shows look different, they should just imagine these are adaptations of true stories being done to the best ability of the story telling technology of the time. However if this really matters that much to you what you actually need is therapy.
Good point. I’ve used the folktale analogy. The story will change depending on who is telling the story. How many ways has the King Arthur legend been told? These stories are just being told about the future.
TV tropes calls that the "Literary Agent Hypothesis", named after the idea that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, Doctor Watson actually did write the stories, and Arthur Conan Doyle was just his literary agent It's a fun little game to play, because it's a license to look past the soundstage and the actors, and to make little edits where you decide that that's not what it "really" looked like
You just had to slip that insult in at the end. There was a perfect middle of the road comment near everyone could get on board with and you put a razor blade in it.
The weird thing is that people do this all the time without thinking about it. They recast a character? We accept that it's still the same person anyway. The Russian characters are all speaking English? We accept that they're actually speaking Russian, and that the show is translating for us. We can see the wires holding Peter Pan up the air? We don't care, we accept that he's flying. The actor is a short woman in her early twenties dangling from wires in your local theatre. But the _character_ is Peter Pan, soaring high above the trees in Neverland But most people can only do it when they're not thinking about it. And so you get people complaining about the "paradox" when William Shatner plays a character in a world where Star Trek exists as a TV show. There's no paradox. Just because the actor is William Shatner, it doesn't mean that the character is Shatner, or even looks much like him
@@accidentalmadness1708 -- You can take that as an insult or, hear me out here, as encouragement to get help. Some critics went off the deep-end with their critique of this aspect of the show. They completely lost the plot and came off as disturbingly unhinged.
I had to get used to the Klingons. It felt like watching something I loved suddenly replacing an integral portion of it with something else I piked. Like replacing Sisko suddenly with James Spader only to have them slowly add make up to make him look like James Avery only to eventually just bring Avery back and pretend they never had Spader. I didn't say it was bad, it was just a struggle earlier on. As for the show as a whole, I came to discovery later than something thanks to the weird Orville vs. Trek conspiracy nonsense early on. Thankfully I realized who those voices really were and quickly abandoned that nonsense. I love Discovery from Episode 1. I'm currently doing a watch through of it with my wonderfully patient girlfriend and I'm seeing more to love through how she enjoys it.
While I do find myself enjoying fewer, longer storylines over a season from my TV series recently, I can accept that you weren't a fan of how drawn out Discovery's stories were. Do you see space for a Trek show to have maybe three storylines in a season, each of 4-5 episodes each, which may or may not ultimately lead into the season finale? While I'm fine with episodic shows and do enjoy Strange New Worlds, I feel I'm personally enjoying the serialized format more recently.
"I'm not going to even go over every season"
Proceeds to go over every season.
Never change, Steve
"The first season was off to a rocky start." So they WERE following along faithfully with a longly held Star Trek tradition.
There's a case to be made here. IMHO, both DS9 and TNG were very lumpy until S3. Enterprise, until S4. TOS, though, hit the ground running, I'd say.
I think the first season was the best. It was all over the place but it a fantastic ride, and addressed things we had never really seen in Trek before, e.g. fascists in plain sight, and rehabilitation for crimes that hurt almost everyone.
behind the scenes drama - oh yes very much in the TNG season 1 history
What are you talking about? The first season of TNG is widely hailed as a masterpiece of well written and acted and not even a little bit incredibly racist or sexist episodes!
I stand by my assertion that, if you were to combine both series of Strange New Worlds into a traditional ~20 episode long first season it would be the best first series of any Star Trek show.
I think that you hit the nail on the head when you talk about the serialization of the story. I have some minor complaints about some of the things that the series did (I've never found mirror universe plots terribly interesting, I thought the mushroom drive was kind of dumb, I didn't think it was necessary to tie the main character to Spock, etc), but I'm willing to look past a lot of those things because Star Trek has *always* embraced a certain silliness. But the serialized storytelling killed me. Both in this series and Picard. In a monster-of-the-week style of storytelling, a bad episode is one-and-done---you watch it, roll your eyes, and hope that next week is gonna be better. When you decide to completely serialize a show like this, if the plot doesn't catch you, you have a season to get through. It is very frustrating.
It also kinda kills episodes that are meant to be fun one-offs to develop characters.
I agree with everything you've said, Alexander. I finally quit watching after Season 3 of Discovery and Season 1 of Picard. I just couldn't take the obviously stretched out serialization.
This is something Orville did better.
It was serialised, but in a loose way with plenty of opportunity for standalone episodes.
@@alanpennie True.
@@alanpennieyes, though arguably that's less serialized, and more leaving threads for later, plus some multi episode runs. Sort of. Orville is good for a lot of reasons, but smaller stories are a big part of it.
growing up in the 1960s with the original series, I paid no attention, grew up and married a man that was a Star Trek fan, still no interest to learn, but I have to give it to you Steve, you have an amazing way to draw listeners in and make it interesting, I know more about Star Trek now listening to you then I ever intended to know , my husband also thanks you
It was amazing watching Doug Jones walk in season 1, because he broke his back carrying it.
Is saru trying to do his Michael Jackson move😂😂😂😂
My biggest gripe with Discovery was that they cast Tig Notaro and then barely gave her any fucking screen time.
But also one of the strengths of Disco is that they cast Tig Notaro
tig was sooo good in this role
This is what I've been saying since she was introduced. I don't think there's even a solid 15 minutes of screentime to make "Best Of" youtube compilations with :/ Let alone how much she actually added to the show every single time she DID show up. Pretty sure some of the ensigns have more screen time than THE CHIEF ENGINEER???
They put her in enough that I went from not knowing who Tig Notaro is to wanting her in everything, and to that I owe a debt of gratitude.
There was a pandemic and Tig chose not to fly during those times and the showrunners respected that. Blame the pandemic
I have a feeling that we would have known more about the rest of the ensemble if the writers had paid less attention to crafting the ubiquitous 500-word pontifications, and devoted those 10 minutes per episode letting Owo and Dettmer share some cool tidbits of their lives. Instead, all we get are knowing looks from them while Saru, Pike, or Burnham drone on and on with "I know you're scared, but you're the best damn crew in Starfleet, blah, blah..."
Saru helped me with my anxiety, as I related to him that his fears were a form of lies that even his own mind was telling him. That will always be the legacy of Discovery for me.
My mother always said fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. Saru means a lot to me too.
"People aren't robots."
Data: "I take exception to that."
😉
Michael Burnham is a rare example of a character that was overdeveloped. She had huge personal arcs in basically all the seasons. No Star Trek character has ever had so much *backstory*. Even in S3, they introduced a whole timeskip seemingly just to give Michael more backstory to explore.
And that was a shame, because it meant that she never settled as a character. It's not that I don't know who Michael is, it's that I have five different Michaels who all seem inconsistent with each other, none of whom get to fully just exist for more than an episode or two at a time. Try describing S5 Michael and S1 Michael to a friend who hasn't seen the show, and see if they can guess whether you're describing one character or two.
Well, and I’m okay that she grows and shifts, and ostensibly we see that growth, but like… it sounds ridiculous to say this given HOW MUCH time they devote to trying to have things happen to her and build that growth. But somehow it just never *lands* for me.
I’ll have to sit with this awhile, because I feel the elements of characterization were shown more than told, and reinforced through actions and relationships, and we see the beats that believably should lead to the changes she has. She was very well acted.
So why doesn’t it work for me?
Like it’s okay to change, and the changes are backed up. She’s overpowered but not invulnerable, and it’s very much a part of her character arc that she’s fallible and learns that she is not an island, and learns from her mistakes and learns connection and reliance on others are essential, most of all in leadership. We know what core values she has and sees what drives her.
So *WHY* do I still feel like I don’t know this character? Why do I have such fewer touchstones about Pike yet I feel like I know him more?
Maybe as you say she’s overdeveloped. Maybe the key is to give you enough that it triggers your own imagination to build a full character and trick yourself into a feeling of “knowing.” Maybe if you get too much spoon-fed, your mind is stuck in data acquisition “wait and see” mode and refuses to smooth in the gaps and create the conceit of “knowing.”
I don’t know why that character feels still so much more distant and incomplete than it seems she should.
Yeah. I’m gonna need to sit with this awhile.
There was a cumulative effect of the "changes" to the franchise in Star Trek Discovery. As you iterated through them, each on their own wouldn't have caused the fracas we saw from many legacy Star Trek fans, but when combined, we were offered a show that bore little to no resemblance to the beloved franchise many of us had invested a significant amount of time in.
Personally, it's hard to express how excited I was that a new live action Star Trek series was lauching. I can remember watching the first few episodes of Discovery and feeling that excitement slowly turn to resentment. Magic mushroom spore drive, navigating giant space tardigrades (LOL), purple marble mouthed Klingons with undecipherable speaking abilities, mutiny by the lead character, unnecessary and preventable death of the first captain, space whales, double hosed pissing, deranged Spock, magical telepathic capabilites of Sarek, breath door locks, smug computer voice, sunlight bathed rooms and corridors, shiny metallic everything sets, lens flares, blue light everywhere, whispering dialog, etc., etc., all added up and created something incredibly unfamiliar.
Not to mention the storytelling had completely changed in tone. Gone were big philisophical ideas, moral dilemmas and subtle world building plots. Gone were stories that provoked further thought. Discovery's stories were firnly rooted in surface level absolutes. Each a linear journey where a nemesis must be defeated or a mystery box solved. Each a mini Marvel superhero movie where good and bad are clearly laid out and we root for the heroes because we're told they're the heroes. After watching all 5 seasons, I can count on one hand the times when I was intrigued enough to spend time thinking about the show after it aired. In short, Discovery was NOT Star Trek, at least it wasn't for me. It was something else entirely. All the Gorn skeleton, Tribble, Guardian of Forever fan service and Easter eggs didn't make it Star Trek either. The showrunners used all that to lure in the sizeable audience the franchise had grown over decades, including me. Small wonder there was deep resentment.
I think your intepretation of why legacy fans rebelled, cheapens the very real experience many of us had with the show.
I'd need my own hour-long video to refute everything in this video but I think you hit on a lot of points. They changed everything just for the sake of change, making it virtually unrecognizable as Star Trek. This is also why I really can't take arguments like "90's Star Trek was 'made up' and Discovery is 'made up' so stop complaining" seriously. If you are going to make Star Trek, you just have to adhere to a number of principles. Some of which can be bent, but break too many and you end up with Discovery/Picard.
The reason I don’t like the argument that canon can be changed is that if you’re going to change a franchise’s canon, there are only three reasons you would do it: 1) you have envisioned a new canon so genius that it would work perfectly with the franchise’s preexisting ideology, 2) you’re lazy, and you want to create a new canon that’s less challenging to tell stories in, or 3) you have an active grievance against the ideology of the franchise, and want to change the canon to support an ideology that you like. I think Discovery oscillates between number two and number 3. At its best, it was just lazy with canon. At its worst, it had contempt for the ideology of Star Trek and wanted to change everything, just so it could challenge the notions of exceptionalism, duty, chain of command, etc. that the franchise was founded on.
" Each a linear journey where a nemesis must be defeated or a mystery box solved. Each a mini Marvel superhero movie where good and bad are clearly laid out and we root for the heroes because we're told they're the heroes" -- Steve touches on the storytelling, but largely attributes the problem to the pacing of one long story across a whole season - but I agree with you here: the stories themselves sucked.
Season Two, the "Red Angel" - instead of a possible genuinely eerie alien red angel, we get yet more Michael Burnham?, spare me please. Then, they go 900 years into the future to destroy a powerful AI but yet have no problem when their ship develops sentience?
Season Three set up The Burn, and then whiffed the ending badly (space baby crying???), Season 4 the ending I quite liked, but the path there was really dull.
Season five 's story had enough holes to fly an Excelsior-class through, Moll and her offsider were dull, and yet again they whiff the ending, with Michael, "we have this supposedly extremely powerful godlike technology that I've supposedly proven myself to be allowed to use" just basically going "oh well, never mind I don't feel like it".
I really wish that quality of writing for Disco would have been more consistent and that had it more of an "ensemble" show.
Ash Tylor discovers he's actually a 20th century sound engineer named Clem Fandango!
Can you hear me?
There are a few things I like about DIS.
1) Takuvma, Lorca, and Empress Giorgio are well written antagonists.
2) The Prime Directive finally getting subsections and guidelines instead of being so nebulous.
3) Saru's people is very fleshed out with an interesting backstory right out of classic Trek.
I do understand your frustration and exasperation with supposed fans who do nothing but very publicly and monetizably bitch about canon, I really do. But the things you love about Star Trek (how it relates to the present day, the emotional truths of its characters and stories, its commitment to presenting an aspirational message) directly result in a huge population of people who are in love with the elements of the show you go out of your way to call out as insignificant window dressing.
Emotional investment in the characters and their struggles is going to lead to emotional investment in the secondary world. That's just something we have to manage and express in constructive ways that don't involve death threats to people who are just showing up to do their job where they pretend to live in space, because that's what being a fucking human being is, Jesus Christ.
Finally, material criticism of Discovery to keep this screed tethered to the topic at hand, the real reason I'm bothered by Michael Burnham's relationship with Spock is because a large chunk of Spock's (rather limited) characterization and depth in his original appearances was tied to his relationship with his family, and how those relationships interact with his struggles over his Vulcanness and humanity. In Discovery, since the show really isn't about Spock, it never felt to me like Michael fit into that paradigm in an interesting and compelling way, and Strange New Worlds, which is considerably more about Spock, has made it clear that it's not going to bother trying either.
I think my biggest issue with Discovery is that it didn’t lean into what made it great often enough. People complain that it’s too emotional, but I think that was its greatest strength. Instead of giving us moments of building relationships, it felt obligated to having action sequences as much as possible. For example, instead of getting a full Season 4 finale dedicated to the dynamics of making contact with the 10-C, we have to have a high stakes chase with a villain that was honestly never that interesting. In the season 3 finale, Tilly tells a story about how she was depressed on her birthday and Michael just comforted her without mentioning her birthday, but this story is sandwiched into a high stakes action moment instead of being shown to us previously. And of course, the Season 5 timey wimey episode where Michael has a fist fight with herself from the past, in what feels like bold character assassination of Season 1 Michael as wildly irrational. Discovery was at its best when it was feeling, not fighting.
I didn't like Star Trek: Enterprise because Archer was one-note angry all the time (talk about emotional), and I struggled with the beginning of Star Trek: Discovery because Michael was one-note sad/crying.
But it became less one-note over time. I like it when series have _emotional range_. I don't mind characters crying; I just wanted to see anger, anxiety, ennui, zen feelings, happiness, etc. too.
And, really, they did deliver on that much more as time went on.
It definitely delved too much into violent action schlock and too many times of people putting themselves into stupid amounts of danger. I like action sometimes, but I would have been happier if they had more building tension and more variety in types of action. I think they could have also benefited from lowering the stakes sometimes. Often it was just kind of exhausting to the point I stopped caring about the outcome of events.
It probably was enhanced by my semi-binging over 3 (non-contiguous) days the 5th and final season, and knowing it was the final season…
But I was quite annoyed with the extended action sequences with what felt like flourishes with no stakes. It seemed to me like major wastes of time. The aforementioned “Burnham v Younger Burnham” and the long fight with Burnham and Moll. They just felt like (pretty and technically difficult) time fillers.
I say no stakes, because Burnham had enhanced protagonist armor by then, as the story required it, so of all the bits I felt could have been a bit hand-waved, like 75% of the time in the fight sequences was an example.
Like, I get the “cool” factor, and some of the moments I’m left wishing had been in the series, it was “let’s meet Ariam then kill her” late in the series to go back and shoehorn in instead, but still.
Also, this last season to heavily feature Not-Owo** and The Other One on the bridge (sorry; didn’t know them well enough to really care about their characters, no shade to the characters/actors) was annoying. I felt like there was so much more we could have gotten from the “almost-there” characterization with Owo and Dettmer, that investing in them for more screen time and reclaiming a little of that wasted “action sequence” time would have been able to substantially pay off another relationship we “kinda” cared about already.
(** not trying to be rude there; it’s just so often in a new cut back to the bridge in S5 would be, whether framing or my ADD-butt attention span, I’d see a glimpse to the left of the bridge and hope we’d be focusing on Owo again, then they’d pan over and it was Not Owo. No disrespect intended, just I really liked Owo and her almost-characterization, and was left with that feeling when I was, in fact, *not* getting more Owo.)
There’s likely production-related reasons that make total sense, and the people there did a fine job, but I missed the connection between Owo and Dettmer up there.
Maybe they needed to be gone to raise the ship-flying stakes and make it less a given they’d make it, since those 2 already had earned their Plot Amor Badass Skills Badges, but still.
Signed, A Person Who Didn’t Know How Much She Wanted More Owo and Dettmer Until She Was Salty She Didn’t Get It.
*I* give a shit about Saru’s rank, because I think he was (is) one of the best Captains in the history of Star Trek. I also liked that Michael was the main protagonist without being Captain, and insisting she replace Saru in later series, I think slightly devalues her character.
And for another first, Saru was the first non-human Captain of the titular ship.
Making her captain was kind of a cop out.
I think the show should have ended with her being promoted to captain and getting her own ship.
I liked it because in a supposedly more egalitarian society, rank shouldn’t be so important. Starfeet officers are such terrible workaholics, and it should absolutely not be glorified. I would want a captain or a boss like Saru, but I would also like more flexibility in roles and responsibilities in a workplace.
@@alanpennie Yeah, if Burnham stayed as a science officer in s2 and became first officer for the rest of the show I think I wouldve liked it more. It would be something new for trek, the main character not being the captain, and would also allow for burnham to grow more comfortable being in command until she gets her own captaincy at the end.
@@alanpennie You have a point.
Great review. I am 54 years old and have been watching Star Trek since I was 12. All of the series have good and bad points. I find the good in all of them. Great to see the positive message still going strong.
Great video overall, but I do have to disagree slightly with your view on canon and continuity.
To be clear, I'm not as strict on this as I used to be. Production design changes and timeline alterations are inevitable with a long running franchise, and canon can be flexible if it benefits the story.
However, Discovery is a new entry in an established franchise, specifically building off familiar events and factions. Maintaining consistent continuity within a story is a basic aspect of fiction because a writer is temporarily maintaining the illusion of a real world.
So when Discovery has a lot of really obvious contradictions all at once, it's hard to blame fans who care about canon for being upset.
You are right that the story at hand is most important, but to say that canon isn't a valid criticism, or to imply that anyone who has a problem with it is just an irrational whiner, is unfair. (I know that's not what you intended but that's kinda how it came across at times).
Then again I'm sure you have dealt with a lot of annoying and irrational fans over the years, so I might be fed up after a while too if that were the case.
As the Prince once said, "He a bit confused but he got the spirit."
That sums up my feelings for Disco.
One thing that I think Steve never gives a lot of consideration to about the people bitching about canon with respect to Discovery is that in the lead up to the series, there was a *lot* of hay made about how Discovery would be in the non-Kelvin timeline, that it would fit within that canon, and that it would be faithful to that canon. He touches on that here, and obviously the conspiracy theories are ridiculous, but I feel like he undersells how strongly the execs were trying to push those points in order to distance themselves from the Kelvin movies. Even though I don't really care about a lot of things they did, I feel like there's a certain amount of fairness to people feeling like they were bait-and-switched on that point.
The thing about her always being the center of every episode: its that the plot had to bend over backwards to get her in the center all the time. For instance when Adira went down to Trill it makes no sense that she is accompanied by her. Emotionally and medically it should have been Stamets.
The criticism that the show is too Michael-centric is valid. We're Trekkies. We know how ensemble casts work. No one has ever complained about TNG being too Picard-centric (maybe too Data-centric, but not to Michael levels). Even TOS, which really did only focus on its leads, didn't give us all Kirk (or Spock), what he was thinking, and his backstory all the time.
Yes, Steve says "she's the anchor, ensemble shows have an anchor" - then proceeds to tell us that he doesn't really like her as a character, but that "complaining fanboys" shouldn't dislike the show as a whole simply because they also happen to dislike that main character. Especially when said main character in the first two seasons repeatedly did enormously dumb things in the service of the plot and then becomes Captain when Saru is ALREADY the Captain and what's more, a far superior captain than she turned out to be in two seasons!
Oh, tying her story in with Spock's turned out just as the "complaining fanboys" feared - a cheap short-hand device to excuse the writers from actually developing a distinct character we'd actually give a monkey's about.
One complaint I’ve seen about Discovery that completely baffles me is the claim that the show’s presentation of society’s prejudices - especially in terms of LGBTQ (and particularly trans rights) - is too “in your face” compared to older Trek shows.
Um, the original series depicted the ignorance of racism by having the last 2 members an entire species - whose faces were painted literally half black and half white - fight to the death. This aired at the height of the Civil Rights movement when peaceful protesters were being beaten in the streets… And DISCOVERY is the “in your face” Trek show?!
Holding a mirror up to society and commenting on its uglier and shameful areas has ALWAYS been the core of Star Trek. If anything, Discovery depicted its LGBTQ characters as completely ordinary people, which is the WHOLE POINT of setting aside the trivial differences between people and living together harmoniously.
Great video, Steve! Thank you for your work… your videos are often the highlight of my day 😁
I can sympathise with certain points (such as having politicians appear in the show) being a bit on the nose, but equally I think you're right and that people are ascribing an artifice to Trek that it never really possessed: the TOS episode where they play the "The USA evolved independently on this planet card" springs to mind.
If these people want a show that really lost its way in effectively weaving moral messages into its plot they should really watch series 10 of Doctor Who where, on multiple occasions, the characters more or less turn to the camera in the middle of the plot to explain the moral of the story as if the audience are 5 year olds (I'm possibly being a little unfair but it's much worse than in most of the prior series bar the first one from 1963) 😊.
People get soo revisionist about Trek.
Uh yeah. That's the part they don't like. They're pretending it's actually obnoxious representation because they're uncomfortable with the normalization of forcefully repressed people with minority statuses.
The real complaint those critics have is that Discovery is too "in THEIR face" about the societal prejudices which those folks hold
I dislike discovery, but it was no less in your face than the original series or TNG 😂
Counter-point to "Without Discovery none of those other projects would exist": without Discovery we might have had a whole different set of shows.
This show relaunched Trek and ends with 15 more episodes than megahit Stranger Things and four direct spinoffs (Short Treks, SNW, Section 31, and Academy). We have it to thank for the explosion of new shows and breaking the format for what a Trek show can be. Even though DS9 is my favorite, and even though it's a hybrid crew of Starfleet, Bajoran militia, and civilians, even that show was basically about a captain and crew in all the standard positions. Discovery declared that the show could have an unstable captain's seat. We can go three years without knowing who the CMO or chief engineer are. We can follow the redemption of one character across two ships and the underdog lower decks crew she befriends along the way. We can normalize wearing a heart on one's sleeve as fuel for doing a better job, instead of seeing crying as a weakness. Diversity is super strong with this show. Burnham went from someone seeing her parents ripped from her, being raised by Sarek and Amanda (stunting her emotional growth), being cold and emotionless at first, coming out of her shell, having a maverick martyr complex, then learning to be more transparent and deliberate, and finally commanding by gently leading others away from the kinds of mistakes she used to make. Season four was a stand-out as a hard sci-fi riff on "The Devil in the Dark," with shades of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters, The Abyss, Contact, and Arrival, showing rigorous data gathering and communication in good faith winning out over preemptive strikes borne of vengeance and fear. It also showed the value of restorative justice.
It's a show that made no apologies about wearing its heart on its sleeve and I absolutely adored it for that reason. It took Troi's advice to Data "that emotions aren't good or bad; it's what you do with them that counts" and showed how empathy is the absolutely essential fuel in the fight for justice, not a weakness to be pitied.
Supporting that theme, every season brought on new mentors that were experts in psychology and emotional intelligence: Cornwell, Pike, Vance, Rillak, as well as promoting Culber to counselor and employing the services of Dr. Kovich.
The show dared to shift focus away from senior officers on a Starfleet posting, by focusing on one person's growth from grief-stricken maverick with a martyr complex to someone who learns to move past that by being more transparent and deliberate, and gently guiding people away from the kinds of mistakes she used to make.
I'd rank the seasons from best to good: 4, 3, 5, 1, 2. Season one showed how peace can only be achieved through good faith. Season two showed how we can seek forgiveness and reconciliation for the past. Season three showed how connection is essential. Season four showed how the arduous work of reaching out to the seemingly implacable foe is an essential counter to the flailing preemptive strikes borne out of grief, a pretty full circle thematic tie. And season five showed the wisdom of not wielding too much power.
No matter what show is your favorite from the current era, you have Discovery to thank for it. No longer were shows constrained to the same formula. Star Trek is so much bigger than any one format. DSC's focus on underdogs meant that we could have a show about people who left Starfleet in PIC, a show about a quartet of ensigns at the beginning of their career in LDS, a show with young people who never even heard of Starfleet or the UFP, and a show that fills in the blanks in the transition period between Pike and Kirk. It also birthed Short Treks, which was a great testbed for new Trek concepts.
I'm looking forward to see what new kinds of Star Trek shows we'll see in the future. There's already talk about a Section 31 show (Will that be about how that organization finds redemption?) and an Academy show. But I'd like to challenge Star Trek to branch out even more than it has during this era. Let's see what the Star Trek future is like from the perspective of civilians. Let's see what it's like to live planetside. DS9 showed we could do a space station to critically acclaimed results.
That said, I'm completely agnostic on the format for any Trek show. It could center on one character or dozens of characters. It could be heavily serialized or be completely an anthology, with zero returning characters from week to week. It could be a sitcom, a political thriller, a mystery series, a musical, a legal drama, a show about a suburban family, a variety show, a talkshow, a sketch comedy show, public access, a vlog, or be made up entirely Federation Council C-SPAN. The more different each Trek show is from previous Trek shows, the better. As far as I'm concerned, Trek is a philosophy, not a genre or format. As long as it's about a diverse group of seemingly implacable foes learning to communicate in order to solve problems in a post-artificial economy in which everyone's needs for survival are met without means testing, then I'm happy.
I was always fascinated by Keyla Detmer, I wish we got to learn more about her.
Honestly I really disagree with your take about the aesthetic continuity of Discovery. It's true that a lot of the complaints about the aesthetics of the show were blown out of proportion, but if you're making a show that is meant to slot directly into a pre-existing timeline then it should look like it belongs there. If you want to make a show with complete artistic Liberty then you shouldn't set it into a setting with pre-established continuity. I would have absolutely loved to see an aesthetic that's blending between the original series Starfleet and the Starfleet of Star Trek Enterprise, but instead it just feels like Starfleet randomly decided to adopt the aesthetic of the Abrams verse for less than a decade and then immediately go back, it just doesn't make sense.
Women shouldn't be captains by this logic, because TOS established they could not be.
Disco's first season is one of my favourite seasons of NuTrek.
Insanely happy memories of watching it week by week when it released.
Each season walked back more and more of what made it unique and interesting, but even at it's worst ( _cough_ season two _cough_ ) it was still damn good.
My wife and I are huge star trek fans and really looked forward to this show, but outside of a few episodes it really was just kind of boring. The stories were back loaded, everything important happened in the season finales and the rest of the time was spent with the characters in awkward group therapy sessions and episodes that felt like filler meant to waste our time.
Almost the entirety of Discovery and Picard s2 were the only times on Star Trek where I legit was just bored out of my mind wondering how much longer the episode had.
Saru is honestly the only character I liked at all, well him and Linus 😂
I LIKED Saru too and that robot girl,she had an episode where she appeared just to be killed off and i was miffed.Discovery had amazing sets and CGI,but,story -wise,it was lacking.
@@kerry-j4m There was a later episode with some time travel back to when she was still alive, and she got to learn how she would die, came to accept it.
I enjoyed the first 3 seasons of DIS, it was the fourth and fifth seasons where I felt episodes dragged on with little consequence. The whole middle of PIC season 2 was also like that, I enjoyed the first 3 episodes, then a bunch of nothing episodes in the middle, then an okay final episode.
“Professional grievance merchant” is both an excellent name for a band and the perfect way to describe what some of these folks are. I wish they weren’t so ubiquitous.
Excellent band name, or franchise episode:
"Indiana Jones and the Ubiquitous Professional Grievance Merchants"
"Harry Potter and the Ubiquitous Professional Grievance Merchants"
I think Disco moving to the 32nd century was the best thing for it. No more crow-barring in legacy characters, no more needing to try to fit things into existing continuity, etc... And we met a few really cool new characters, like Federation President Rillak and the riddle that is Kovich. BTW, Kovich is played by legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg. I remember first seeing him, and going, "Wait... is... is that David Cronenberg?!" And then he was on the show for three freaking seasons!
I love Saru. Doug Jones is a national treasure, and I'm so glad he got to have major role like this, even if he was under a ton of makeup. And Saru's journey is so much more interesting than Burnham's. In fact, Disco is one of those shows were the "main character" is probably my least favorite. I like her ok, but I prefer Saru, Tilly, Stamets, Culber, and Reno. Reno's and Stamets' interactions were so awesome! And Stamets and Tilly. BTW, I love that Tilly's actress gained weight, and she was still on the show until the end. Fuck yeah.
I will say; I agree with you, Steve, about the show being episodic. But then, I feel that way about a lot of shows these days... soooo tired of 8-10-13+ episode story arcs. Plus, I think episodic series can do character-based episodes better. Cuz, ya, I'd have loved to see more of Detmer and Owosekun. d-:
Star Trek Discovery is a work of fiction set in a pre-established period (or close enough) of a larger fictitious world. It is, by virtue of this, a period piece. I think what illustrates the ridiculousness of Discovery’s decisions is this: Lord of the Rings is 100% a work of fiction set in a fictionalized time period. If the Council of Elrond was held on a Zoom call over I-pads, a lot of people would have been miffed. Many would have been cheezed if Legolas was given a modern pistol instead of his traditional bow. It’s all fake but there should be consistency in both the world in public perception.
Maybe people wouldn’t care about Elrond using an I-Pad and that’s fine. Lots of people don’t care about things but that doesn’t make the people who do care wrong. We shouldn’t confuse our own disinterest in a thing with the belief that it is not worth the interest.
Agreed, and we definitely shouldn't insult the people who disagree with us.
More than that, imagine if you took literally any other movie, changed nothing about it but slapped the words Star Trek onto it:
- Star Trek: Braveheart
- Star Trek: Titanic
- Star Trek: Citizen Kane
- Star Trek: Avengers: Endgame
It would be absurd. I think if you did this, even Steve would have to admit that there's something to the worldbuilding or the themes or *something* beyond just the story being told that makes Star Trek Star Trek.
I agree with most of his actual critiques of the franchise, and the more reactionary elements of the fanbase. But his dismissal of the non-storytelling elements always strikes me as really dismissive of the craft that goes into building sets, costuming, makeup, prop design, script supervision, editing, etc... They matter and it's fair to critique them for what they bring to the final product or take away from it.
I watched Disco seasons 1 & 2 a year ago, and this video perfectly encapsulates everything that frustrated me : a lot of lovable characters, some really touching episodes, but the writers and the cameras made everything possible to never focus on the really good ideas the show had...I might start again soon, then finishing seasons 3, 4 & 5, this time not focusing on what frustrated me, but on what I loved on it...I hope it will be enough, because there's a lot to love in Disco, it's just that Disco doesn't want me to love these things...
I'm also realising : Discovery, Picard and Strange New Worlds to a certain extent (Pike, M'Banga, La'an, Chapel and Ortegas a bit, even Uhura) are shows focusing on trauma. Kurtzman live action era is focusing on the traumas of its characters, but I'm not able to understand why. Any ideas ? (I'm not all that familiar with other Trek shows, I'm currently into TNG/DS9, I finished STLD, haven't finished yet TOS, but with the exception of DS9 (occupation trauma, death of his wife...), this have never been Star Trek focus...)
@@guillaumet1327 It's a Kurtzman thing. He thinks it reflects the reality of the young folks watching this Trek. He's hoping they'll find it relatable. It's not the kind of optimism traditional Trek has focused on but the characters do work through it and it does show that just because you went through some shit, you can still go on to some kind of happy and productive life and that you don't have to have your future 100% defined by your past.
@guillaumet1327 other commenters points but also trauma was something older trek struggled to deal with due to being so episodic (some exceptions of course) so it's something new trek which can remember what happened last week can explore more.
The execution was crap. Writing was generally crap. Loved Stamets and Culber. Gray was just intolerable (can’t tell if it was the actor or the writing…pending a rewatch). Adira was meh…
Mudd’s episode was fun.
Michael’s progression felt unearned at times…just seemed like her actions would preclude her from making captain. There were some strong points for Michael…again I think it was the crap writing.
All around it was just horribly inconsistent in quality on most fronts. Oh, and the “insert galactic threat here” season spanning arc for seasons 2-5 was tiring…the Klingon War could have been better and more interesting if it had been given room to breathe over more than one season.
I’ll note I loved that shuttle ride in the beginning when they perfectly timed the uncut shot with the noted distance and warp factor (suck it, Abrams).
If I want to watch a daily show about depression and trauma.... I'd rather watch CNN....
Would love to see a video on the whole Lower Decks controversy regarding Discovery as canon. My thought is love or hate the show, Strange New Worlds can’t happen without this show as canon.
Hell I remember when Next Generation came out and some people lost their minds. I love the original because it reminds me of my dad who is no longer with us and I was leery of STNG but grew to love it, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as well. I don't get paramount so I haven't seen Picard or Discovery but I I'm sure I will and I look forward to the day I do!! By the way I'm really glad I found your site, I really enjoy your take on Trek and agree with your politics.
One of the strangest thing about modern Star Trek writing for me, is that it echoes itself. Sure, they course corrected and brought back Culber, but they also did the same thing again with Gray. DISCO S2, PIC S1, and LD S1 all had robotic space tentacles. PIC S1 and LD S1 both end with Riker saving the day. A lot of these "echoes" are minor, but when you add them to the occasional story beat or set piece that is almost-too-close to another Sci-Fi story or cinematic universe, and it really becomes noticeable.
The critique:
“I wish the show maintained a better visual and thematic consistency with previous series, and that the characters on that show displayed a greater degree of professionalism befitting of their roles”
The response:
“SHUT UP NERD”
Exactly!
Summarized perfectly!
Currently rewatching TOS, only 5 episodes in and so far we've got:
- The third canonical episode uses uniforms from The Cage, which are never seen again.
- Janice Rand has been sexually harassed or assaulted nearly every episode with 0 apologies, Spock even implying that she probably liked it
- Bridge officers publicly joke about their past sexual exploits
Professionalism and consistency are in very short supply in this show, I think we tend to have selective memories with some of the things that happen in this show. That even extends to TNG and DS9 era, I wouldn't call playing a prank by having your boss pick up a sex invitation on vacation to be very professional.
"The main character cries too much" is now also a complaint for The Doctor in Doctor Who...
and what's stranger, is people blaming it on the actor, rather than the writing?
Didn't know that. But I kinda agree. I always roll my eyes when Michael starts giving some inspirational speech and her eyes start to water and stuff. It isn't anything terrible, but I'm still a bit annoyed by it.
Except it's a valid point this time, since the big, emotional reaction in the finale that's supposed to hit you like a train is instead just one of many. That said, it's hardly the biggest problem the show has, and since it was filmed alongside the next season, not much will change anytime soon. Doesn't really "ruin" the show, as some claim.
It's true for discovery. Not so much for doctor who. If a tear or two are now "cries too much" then discovery drowns in a sea of tears. 😂
While I'm not much of a fan of nuTrek (with the exception of Lower Decks which is more of a lighthearted animated lark), I *DO* appreciate that Discovery in particular increased the diversity in the casting of Trek actors and stepped up on representation for marginalized groups. The shows are still not my bag (with the aforementioned exception), but I will give credit where credit is due.
I won't give them credit for this and it is not 'due'. Filling your cast with as many diversity checkboxes isn't some stunning and brave thing to do, no matter how smug you boast about it afterwards in interviews. We've had black female ADMIRALS in Star Trek in the 90's and no one made a big song and dance about it. Make better Star Trek, instead of going through a DEI checklist and parading them around.
It was just bad. You're right to dismiss the rabid regressives and the banality brigade that were mad about lore inconsistencies, aesthetic etc. But it just had nothing to offer. To me, anyway.
Interesting but also astounding to hear such a measured and reasonable take from someone that views the show so positively. I earnestly appreciate the opinion. As for me, I hope the legacy is to be forgotten or reacted strongly against.
I always said that the serialization was the biggest issue. But there were certainly others. Maybe you're right and my notion of Star Trek is too fixed. SNW is a huge improvement but still inferior to Voyager in my opinion. I hope they come up with something good in a decade or so.
Dang. I never watched Discovery just because the streaming format doesn't really work for me, but you just made me want to try it.
Despite it's flaws it's worth checking out.
it is a shock visually and maybe a little tonally, Steve's analysis is a pretty good and you sort of have to see where they were headed in a story, even if they didnt reach it.
Honestly now it’s done is possibly the best time. There’s no more point in hoping they change X or Y next year, and you can just go with it as it is.
@@twitchew I was never shocked by the look.... what people forget is that OUR tech and design quality has improved a lot since the 60's. Did people really expect things to look as cheap and bland as TOS just because it's set around that time period? It may be set before/around the TOS era in universe, but it's still a modern Trek show with modern visuals.
Other matters aside, the whisperibg of dialog in this series irritated me no end. My favorite character was Reno, both for the actor's scripting and performance, and for delivery of her lines in a normal voice, without Emotional Music overlaid in the background (which was also a persistent and annoying distraction).
Agreed. I especially disliked all of Burnham’s whispered scenes.
Aloha Steve! I love your channel and have been following for a few years! keep up the great work! Prost from south Bayern Germany!
After season one, I bailed. I checked in a few times but clearly there was not enough on the menu to make me sit down and eat. This is a great overview, Steve, and I thank you for doing it, but I'm not sorry I skipped 90% of Discovery, and would give anything to have back the hours I wasted on the first season.
Another excellent Star Trek video; thank you, Steve! You expertly, fairly, and perfectly encapsulated all of the things that worked and didn't work about Discovery, and reminded me - yet again - why I consider you a voice of reason among the online Star Trek community.
Internal inconsistencies: at what level does it start to matter to you? Would inconsistencies in a particular episode matter to you? Or would it have to be within a scene? After all, at each level "it's just fiction!". A lot of the time the folks who get all upset at inconsistencies between series (or episodes) are making too much noise for the scale of the problem, but similarly a lot of the times the inconsistencies come across as carelessness or as a misuse of artistic preferences. (Note: I haven't seen any Discovery or Strange New Worlds because Paramount decided they wanted a smaller audience and put them behind paywalls.)
I unironically love the new Klingon designs. Something I really liked in Discovery is that after 30 years of Star Trek turning the Klingons into cuddly almost comic relief characters based around the single joke of seeing everything as a war, Discovery suddenly reminded us that actually these guys are monsters. Redesigning them to look more alien and startling is the shock the franchise needed to get us to see them differently (ha!)
I really enjoyed this review. Although I disagree with your tepid view of later seasons and of Michael Burnham, you discussing how Discovery's main cast is based across the ship (thereby giving less space to bridge crew characters) was especially informative for me looking back on the show, and for drawing threads between the 23rd & 32nd C. eras I remember as two different shows in my head.
Gotta disagree with you on the presentation and inconsistencies. Props, sets and costumes are all important storytelling tools that ground a fictional world in a specific time and place. You wouldn't put a cell phone prop in a 1930s noir. The production artists on TNG, DS9 and Enterprise all worked really hard to design material that fit with and expanded the fictional world in believable ways. That's not trivial. For some of us, that stuff is a core part of the appeal of sci-fi. Discovery's art direction gave up on that work in favor of looking superficially cool. If they didn't want to keep track of those details or make something that looked like that era then they shouldn't have made yet another prequel.
This
I dislike Discovery for several reasons and gave up on the show after season 3 BUT there are several aspects and characters I love.
- Saru: One of the best characters in all of Trek
- Our first on screen gay couple, Stamets and Culber were great.
- Tilly is a delight and her bubbly excitement is relatable af.
- Without Discovery we wouldn't have SNW which is in my top 3 Star Trek shows.
I think Burnham was a better character when she was more Vulcan oriented like she was in the first season. It was very unique having a human raised on Vulcan.
I found her emotional outbursts far more moving when she was "Vulcan" Burnham and suspected the personality change that happened from episode 2 of season 3 was done to answer criticisms of her. I don't think they realised that a lot of the criticisms may have SAID it was about her character.... but it was something else. Fast talking intense Burnham was an interesting person I wanted to know, the later one was a likeable enough character that I dealt with in order to see the people I actually engaged with.
4:39 my wife never got into the show. The look of the Klingons took her out entirely and she had no time for it. I would watch and each time she would say “what is that?” Me “a Klingon.” Her “oh riiiiiight. That’s really distracting for me, I am sorry.” Me: “no worries”
She’s been fine with strange new worlds
There were glimmers here and there, but I think poor storytelling prevented Discovery's acting talent from shining thru.
So often, Discovery felt like homework to set up for something better. Parts of it were good, parts were fine, parts were deeply boring and soulless.
Poor storytelling and no screen time for the other cast members,whom I wanted to know more about and have stories built around them.Like TNG did in their 3rd season.
I wish I could give this video more likes. I really enjoyed this show and I appreciate how it was able to reboot Star Trek on TV but you really captured all of my complaints as well.
Discovery was my introduction to Star Trek and as such will always be the series i come back to. The characters are like family to me and rewatching old episodes feels like coming home
DIsco was fun, had value, had some misfires but overall - it was Star Trek and I liked it. Would like to see these characters again.
Another show I'll never watch; but I have enjoyed Shives' passion about it. That's the legacy to me, I guess. More content from Shives. :D
Great video! The thing I disagree with the most is about Burnham. I think we do know Burnham quite well, but the person that is is a profoundly weird one shaped by the twin traumas of her youth. She is a character who exists in tension with the violent deaths of her parents and the subsequent emotional abuse (or something very like it) from Sarek. This is a person who tried so hard to *be* a Vulcan to try, because the well of Vulcan reserve might be the only thing that can push the pain away. To the extent to which she is a cipher, it's as a defense mechanism. It's only in Season 3, when Book shows her that openness is a better path, that feeling her pain is the only way that she can truly move on, where she gains a measure of serenity she tried so hard to get from the Vulcan philosophy she clung to.
Not for nothing, she is very much a Peak TV-era Protagonist. In many ways, the question "Who is Michael Burnham?" is the central question of the show in the same way "Who is Don Draper?" is for Mad Men.
“The West Wing focuses too much on President Bartlett!”
I think the show improved a lot as it got into later seasons. The writers seemed to respond to fan criticisms, such as Michael being too good at everything. Most of the bridge crew, although diverse, could have been cardboard cutouts. I didn't care for Tilly, but I'm fine that others did like her. Maybe I'm too old school sci Fi geek, but the science in the show was lacking for my taste too. Towards the end some of the episodes felt like i was watching the CW with the amount of interpersonal drama that felt a little unearned. I didn't care about adira and grey's relationship. I don't know if it was the acting or if it was just undeveloped. Today's Star Trek needs better writers!! But all in all, glad the show got made.
Bravo mister, you got me emotional and wanting to watch all over again!
I decided in my head that since the Klingons are an Empire that the Klingons we saw were just a different species of Klingon than seen earlier.
Or a different race. Or different races. What does it matter?
I wish we lived in the alternate timeline where Kurtzman had left and Bryan Fuller had been put in charge. Sure, maybe we wouldn't have gotten 'Strange New Worlds' but given Fuller's track record I truly believe we would have gotten more consistency in the series we did get. Instead of one good show and a bunch of average to terrible seasons of TV I think we'd be sitting here feeling better about everything we got whatever it was.
Disco's pilot was my favourite of all of the Trek series. A XO mutiny so that the optimal outcome was achieved was an amazing opening.
It's a shame it went on a wild ride since then. Season 1 was the best and it gradually got worse as time went on. I stopped in the middle of season 4, I was fatigued, and Prodigy and Lower Decks were satisfying my Trek needs.
Brava, Steve! Excellent analysis and commentary!
The problem I had with the Klingon redesign wasn't that it was different. I cried tears of joy when I saw the Enterprise redesign. The problem isn't change, the problem is that the elements that Steve dismisses (makeup design, costuming, set design, etc) *are* part of the storytelling. They are decisions made with the intent of communicating meaning about some element of the story being told. And when it comes to Discovery's Klingon redesign I think what they were trying to accomplish was to racialize and otherize the Klingons.
The real-world history of the Klingons started with a culture that seemed foreign and savage to the Federation, whose morals are meant as a stand-in for the audience. But over time, as we got to know Klingon culture through TNG, DS9 and a little bit of VOY and ENT, we come to a cultural understanding of them whereby their differences are celebrated instead of viewed as untrustworth or disgusting. When DSC wanted to make the Klingons villains again, it had the makeup team basically turn them into orcs: Making them look more brutal, frightening, and harder to empathize with so that the audience won't empathize with them as much.
Discovery's pilot starts strong with T'Kuvma delivering a really interesting critique of Federation values, akin to the famous root beer scene with Quark and Garak, but then abandons it faster than Voyager abandoned its starting premise and had them become instantly irredeemably evil and I think that decision lacked the nuance that Klingon culture had been treated with throughout the TNG-era shows. It was done in the name of the story, but it did a disservice to the themes of the franchise vis-à-vis tolerance and cultural understanding - themes which later seasons of Discovery did a much better job of embracing.
Season 1 is when I really tried to get emotionally involved with all the new stuff, the serialized storytelling, the new direction, the Klingon war, the mystery of Lorca, only be completely disappointed. They completely squandered the first half of the season by turning Lorca into a cartoon bad guy. They squandered the entire season by resolving the war in such a nonsensical way. And it was only as bad as it was because it was serialized, and the entire season relied on these things to hold together. After that, I didn't get invested as much. Did it get better? Yes. Did it get good? No.
“The show revolves around Michael Burnham” is a problem that my partner and I have with the show, and not because she’s the protagonist but because she’s the only one who gets to be right or do things.
And I’m not saying that it’s “not Star Trek” since it’s a lot more similar to the Original Series and Kirk in that regard, but when I watch TNG, one of my favorite things is how Picard doesn’t instantly know the right answer. One of the ways we learn about the other main/recurring characters is when Picard says, “Ok, we have a problem. What should we do?” And everyone goes around giving their advice about it, which Picard listens to.
Burnham was competent and proved correct so often in ways I just didn’t find interesting. I’m still not sure what the lesson of the “Vulcan hello” mutiny was. Because it seemed like Burnham was correct about the warlike Klingons, but then punished for it. And the only difference with the rest of the show is she stopped being punished for being right all the time.
I really dislike Discovery. I just never enjoyed watching it despite liking lots of things about it, like the jump into the future. That was a really brave shakeup of the status quo. Having a fully sentient ship was really interesting. The main “villain” species of Season 4 was a neat idea.
But nothing seemed to matter compared to Michael Burnham’s personal story, which, to me, came at the expense of everything else. It’s nice that Burnham found love in the 32nd century, but why was everyone else still part of the crew instead of grieving the effective deaths of everyone they’d ever known? Why didn’t the ship being capable of solving every problem they had come up more often?
I liked the look of the show a lot, but I would have loved to have had 20-30 episodes a season with this cast where we got to live with them and get to know them in much lower stakes. I like ensemble shows, and I like when the concerns are something more genuine than “the fate of the galaxy”.
On the bright side, the fanfic writers are going to be eating for generations off of trying to fill in things about this show the canon never showed us.
The look of the Klingons changed several times.
From what I learned this show is 1 where you really had to watch from the beginning. I tried to get into it but couldn’t
Burnham's transition from the, Vulcan Raised Child, to an overly emotional "Human" woman was as cringe inducing as the jarring Klingon transformation.
my only real issue with the 'new' klingons is that they sounded like they were talking with a mouthful of cotton and pebbles - after a few epis i think they modified the prosthetics a bit, and the actors got more used to them, and then they sounded a lot better to me.
Do you believe the federation was too easy on Picard for Wolf 359. 11,000 dead. Ensign Ro was tried for the deaths of 8. Tam Elbrun for the deaths of 47. Shouldn't there have been thousands that blamed Picard like Sisko? Wasn't a trial in order? Or did Picard have huge political clout that allowed him to avoid it. I would love to hear your opinion.
I've briefly dicsussed this before. I liked the first two seasons of Discovery. My only complaints about it is they tried to cram too much story into too little time, and it could've benefitted from better pacing. But once they got into the future, the show just completely lost me. I found the future setting incredibly uncompelling. I just couldn't get into it at all. They pretty much discarded all the stuff about the show that interested me. Suspension of disbelief is a BIG thing in fiction, and while I was able to do it for the first two seasons, the third season onward I couldn't at all. It didn't feel like Star Trek at all...if it felt like anything I'd say it felt more like Andromeda (which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was a dramatic shift for this show). I stopped watching very quickly, and these days I consider the first two seasons a sort of prequel to Strange New Worlds, which I really like so far. Except for the Lower Decks crossover episode...I despise that series. While they did the best they could on the SNW episode with the material, any reference to Lower Decks is too much for me.
I personally think that while serialized storytelling is a good thing, and events should matter beyond the episode they happen in, not every single episode has to be part of an ongoing story. The best shows benefit from both serial stories AND standalone stories. They just need to make sure that they don't do the status quo thing where things that happen in an episode never matter again.
As someone who didn't like Discovery at the start , and didnt care for a good chunk of season 1, I did end up enjoying it a lot. However, cant say I share the same opinion of Burnam. Out of all the characters, she felt the most flat, uninteresting, and I have to respectfully disagree and say her char felt completely inauthentic and didnt believe any of her characters relationships with others. She didn't work for me. At all.
Meanwhile Culber and Stamets worked fantastically together and with their colleagues. Imo, the standouts of the show.
My one disappointment was probably Owosekun. When she got her own episode I was hoping for more for her character throughout the series and was disappointed with how little we got. I feel like she had a lot more potential that wasn't followed up on. Same feeling about Detmer.
Your concluding thoughts eloquently demonstrate why Star Trek still matters, and I'm grateful that Discovery paved the way for its return.
S1 was superb. Really well written. Should stuck to that style and tone. Season 3 started really well but the whole burn resolution being rushed spoiled the end. Should have left the burn as an ongoing mystery, focused on trying to spread the hope of a rebuilt Federation, and all the story opportunities of a post-burn galaxy that they set-up S3:E1-2. They also changed Burnham way too much. Her character was more interesting with all the fast talking Vulcan traits while discovering her humanity.
Season 2 is great because of Pike and Spock. But the Red Angel thing always felt contrived. Never explained why the ship can’t just come back to their century. Control is destroyed so what’s the issue? Other than because that’s what the plot says.
And of course, they needed to give the crew some more character development. They needed their own lead episodes.
It's wild how they not only decided for an entire season to be a fan service-y follow-up to a TNG episode but specifically a TNG episode that was made to be a fan service-y answer to a pedantic nit-picky fan question that kept popping up back in the day, which was "Why do all the aliens look like humans?"
The real answer to this being "Someone decided that depicting aliens through make-up was the best way to go", but that wasn't good enough, so they made an episode with a big reveal answer to that question to which even the characters that witnessed it basically said "Well that's nice to know, I guess. Get ready to be asked this at Trivia Night"
Also I'm surprised you had nothing to say about either version of Philippa Georgiou in this video
23:03 Come on. You can not be serious.
The writing of its characters was absolutely a gigantic flaw
Why was Burnham literally Captain I can do anything and everything
Episode after episode she would come with the solution to some impossible problem immediately.Then she would proceed to execute it better then anyone else could ever do it
Not forgetting to occasionally display the hand to combat skills of a Marvel character
Shout out to comic character Emperor Georgiou and her ability to also beat up or murder a room full of people like no other Star Trek character ever
Also, so many other characters were completely void of charisma
Tilly being the prime example. I mean she has you pining for Barclay, Kes or Polaski every time she came on
I mean yes the storytelling was also horrible. Not helped by silly dead end ideas like the spore drive and the burn
But the characters man. Completely garbagio
We all stan Saru. I want to see him on Star Trek: Academy. At least as a guest lecturer. Jones brings such depth to him.
One issue that many of the latest generation of Trek has is that the stakes are always huge. The existence of the federation/humanity/all life. I want to see different levels of challenges. The more episodic structure of Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks helps with both characterization and the scope of the plot.
The trouble with such huge stakes is that they're hard to relate to. I was more involved when previous series threatened the entire ship's crew with death (TOS) or had all the children kidnapped by a nearby planet (TNG) or could be responsible for war between two allied species (ENT).
Discovery has some of my favorite characters in the franchise, and some excellent episodes. I really wish they had been able to pace out season story arcs better than they did... It's why I prefer a show like SNW that's gone for a *mostly* story of the week focus. It's why one of my favorite series ever is Babylon 5 that had major story arcs, including one for the entire series, but was mostly filled with story of the week episodes.
Is "CONTROL" the same thing as the 'computer virus' that Prodigy was carrying in Season 1?
This was a great video Steve and I enjoyed your review of the series a lot more that I ever enjoyed watching the series itself.
Your whole thing in the beginning of the video about continuity errors and just rolling with it reminds me of all the BS I hear in The Legend of Zelda game fanbase regarding continuity errors between the games, even with the LoZ creator making an "offical" timeline! The nitpicking and endless obsession with details can really ruin an experience with a legacy fanbase. Funny enough, it was Discovery that got me hardcore into Star Trek, despite its own flaws, I loved the bold new take Discovery took on the Trek verse. When I watched thru episodes of TNG, watched all of DS9, and currently watching Voyager, I actually can see how Discovery fits, in its own weird, special way in the verse and its amazing. And I would argue Discovery along with DS9 had some of the best story arcs and character developments in the Trek series.
Thank you for this video man. ❤
I think this was a very fair review of Discovery. I really loved the series despite its flaws, and I wish we could have had it around a little longer because I really wanted to give them a chance to have that perfect season that didn't have those pacing issues described. I really hope some of these beloved characters from Discovery will show up on the new Starfleet Academy spin-off series. Tilly in particular is perfectly positioned to be at least reoccurring on it.
My biggest complaint was the showing vs. telling you mentioned and also the sets. The production values were... Sad. Nothing felt like a set. Everything seemed meaningless. I was watching three people use sandbikes to escape an avalanche and felt nothing. It's *so* hard to feel any stakes at all when every room just looks like a series of greenscreen objects and forced perspective. There's nothing tactile, for so much of the show.
I didn't like, how the klingons looked, when I first watched discovery and I still don't like their look. But when I first watched discovery, I was wondering about what it was, that I don't like about the klingons look. I asked myself for the reason why, and that sure is always a good way for enlightenment: to question oneself. So I thought, I didn't like the look of the klingons in discovery, because they looked too unfamiliar, indeed they looked to ALIEN to me. And then I thought, that exactly that point I brilliant. The show managed not only that the klingons looked alien to the characters of the story, but that I myself felt alien towards them. So the show established, that the klingons looked truely alien to me, and that is a great accomplishment. I still don't like the look of the klingons in discovery, but if they would look as sweet and familiar as little sweet kitten, they wouldn't be klingons anymore, would they?
Years before this series aired, Bryan Fuller's previous creations, Dead Like Me and Pushing Daises were personal favorites. Knowing he started as a Trek writer and long-time fan, I hoped he would get a shot at the reboot. I got close to getting what I wanted, and what I think the show needed. If they wanted to set it near the Kirk era, they needed someone at the helm who knew that show well. But he's also known as a creative showrunner with his own style. Removing him was a mistake, in my opinion. But that's the timeline we live in.
Well, I'm just now watching Discovery, so I'm going to bail out of this video early for now. Having just watched the first two seasons, I must admit they are both a mess. The acting and production values are excellent, but the stories and the writing are just bad. I recall that TNG struggled with writing the first season and a half, so perhaps things were settling down on Discovery, but I'm spending a lot of time shaking my head at story choices. The killing of the doctor is just one of many really bad decisions. Bringing him back in such a "The Search for Spock" sort of way caused me to question why they killed him and not some sort of other temporary character. And just don't get me started on Tilly. Lovely character, but she was involved in every solution. Is a cadet the only crew member who has spare time to work on the spore drive? I'm just reminded that Ronald Moore said that he couldn't make all the pieces of the story work in the finale of BSG and the characters were what was important. No Ron, the story is important too. And it is important for Discovery too.
If the look of the Klingons didn't matter, why did the Berman era runners make such a big point of squaring the difference between TOS Klingons and movie/TNG Klingons? I agree that I can live with differences in makeup and tech...except on the tech front, the Berman era (Enterprise) went to great lengths to make the tech look consistent with TOS.
So, while I appreciate that this doesn't matter to some, it does matter to many, and it matters enough that showrunners dealt with it previously, and anyone who was going to deal with newer series should have been aware of that and not allowed it to throw them off-pace.
I expect literature to be consistent and to avoid contradicting itself. We forgive Tolkien his relatively occasional continuity gaffes, but overall we expect him to remain faithful to what he's already put on paper. I don't think it's too much to ask people in film and television to do the same thing. If you're going to write a sequel, or a prequel, you should be prepared to be bound to what's come before and build on it. You should not come in and declare the previous canon to be irrelevant, or worse crap, and continue the story without respect for what's come before. That's a long preamble, but I agree with you wholeheartedly.
@@darlabenz3097 Mostly agree, except with something like Star Trek, unlike Tolkien (a single person), you're dealing with multiple people with multiple ideas on this, that and the other.
I found the first five episodes of season 1 for me to be very exciting and fresh. I liked that it was written as a tightly plotted "novel for television" set in the Star Trek universe without a comfortable status quo to fall back on. I liked that it focused on a character very different in her position and circumstances than anyone we'd seen in Star Trek before. I liked the sense of real danger in Lorca's amorality and the foreign-subtitled, very alien Klingons. I liked the mysteries and the theorizing they invited. I wish I could have seen more of that show. I gave up on the show midway through season 2, because I felt like it didn't have any of that focused intent anymore and was just kind of wasting my time with overlong meandering stupidity.
I love the look of this show, *especially* what they did with the Klingons.
If it's so important to someone that the shows look different, they should just imagine these are adaptations of true stories being done to the best ability of the story telling technology of the time. However if this really matters that much to you what you actually need is therapy.
Good point. I’ve used the folktale analogy. The story will change depending on who is telling the story. How many ways has the King Arthur legend been told? These stories are just being told about the future.
TV tropes calls that the "Literary Agent Hypothesis", named after the idea that Sherlock Holmes was a real person, Doctor Watson actually did write the stories, and Arthur Conan Doyle was just his literary agent
It's a fun little game to play, because it's a license to look past the soundstage and the actors, and to make little edits where you decide that that's not what it "really" looked like
You just had to slip that insult in at the end. There was a perfect middle of the road comment near everyone could get on board with and you put a razor blade in it.
The weird thing is that people do this all the time without thinking about it. They recast a character? We accept that it's still the same person anyway. The Russian characters are all speaking English? We accept that they're actually speaking Russian, and that the show is translating for us. We can see the wires holding Peter Pan up the air? We don't care, we accept that he's flying. The actor is a short woman in her early twenties dangling from wires in your local theatre. But the _character_ is Peter Pan, soaring high above the trees in Neverland
But most people can only do it when they're not thinking about it. And so you get people complaining about the "paradox" when William Shatner plays a character in a world where Star Trek exists as a TV show. There's no paradox. Just because the actor is William Shatner, it doesn't mean that the character is Shatner, or even looks much like him
@@accidentalmadness1708 -- You can take that as an insult or, hear me out here, as encouragement to get help. Some critics went off the deep-end with their critique of this aspect of the show. They completely lost the plot and came off as disturbingly unhinged.
I had to get used to the Klingons. It felt like watching something I loved suddenly replacing an integral portion of it with something else I piked. Like replacing Sisko suddenly with James Spader only to have them slowly add make up to make him look like James Avery only to eventually just bring Avery back and pretend they never had Spader. I didn't say it was bad, it was just a struggle earlier on.
As for the show as a whole, I came to discovery later than something thanks to the weird Orville vs. Trek conspiracy nonsense early on. Thankfully I realized who those voices really were and quickly abandoned that nonsense. I love Discovery from Episode 1. I'm currently doing a watch through of it with my wonderfully patient girlfriend and I'm seeing more to love through how she enjoys it.
While I do find myself enjoying fewer, longer storylines over a season from my TV series recently, I can accept that you weren't a fan of how drawn out Discovery's stories were. Do you see space for a Trek show to have maybe three storylines in a season, each of 4-5 episodes each, which may or may not ultimately lead into the season finale? While I'm fine with episodic shows and do enjoy Strange New Worlds, I feel I'm personally enjoying the serialized format more recently.
SNW & Prodigy balance out the serialized/episodic process well
There was a great bottle episode featuring Detmer and Owosekun that we never got.
(Discovery takes place before TOS)
Haters: I wish the new Star Trek was set after DS9
(Discovery jumps to the 32nd century)
Haters: Not like that