I’ve just watched all five seasons. Couple of thoughts and questions:
So they come up a new advanced drive, which is powered by. . . a giant tardigrade with a bad attitude? We expect a certain amount of technical mumbo-jumbo, but that was the best they could do?
Was there a stated reason that the writers vaulted it 900 years into the future? Felt constrained by working within the limits of TOS universe?
Did they have a vision on what caused “The Burn” when that was introduced? If they wanted to come up with a galaxy-spanning catastrophe that they were eventually planning to explain, it seems as though they could have come up with something other than it having been caused by upset, orphaned, lonely, abandoned kid having an emotional meltdown.
That was it exactly. With ST:SNW in the hopper, the TOS timeline was about to get really crowded. I thought a time jump was a decent enough solution, but 1,000 years??? And when they get there, beside the Burn (which is lame, IMO), people, culture, customs, tech, etc. are essentially the same as the era they left. But all that could be forgiven if they just had some good stories and characters to work with, instead of an idealistic speech/preach of the week.
That’s the bullshit answer Kurtzman or whoever gave, but the real world answer is that none of them are good enough writers or storytellers to come up with anything compelling that could fit within those limits.
We know this because even after they freed themselves from those restraints, the best they could come up with was, as you point out, the lackluster Burn storyline.
Given that the Burn reveal was all about the power of emotion, and how for its entire run Discovery force-fed us a constant stream of touchy-feely-huggy excessively emotional drivel, I wouldn’t believe for a second that they ever envisioned the Burn being caused by anything other than an emo Kelpian.
…no, the real-world answer is the one Kurtzman gave. And I think the writers and storytellers were great. I enjoyed the show. I thought season two was IMHO, one of the top seasons of Trek.
And I’ll be brutally honest: that’s what I need out of Trek. The world is so miserable right now. And if Trek wants to give me a constant stream of feely-huggy, excessively emotional drivel, I’ll take it.
I would argue that effectively slapping the show-wide reset button is generally not the mark of a great writer, but to each their own I guess. I’m happy you’re happy.
I’ve not watched much of the show, but I did observe a lot of people claiming that they were constantly running into continuity problems with earlier written (but later set) Trek, and that moving them to the future would allow them to tell the stories they wanted to tell without having to worry about trying to make it work.
The talk I did see suggested the Burn exists so that the Discovery people are still relevant. They complain about the practicality with the existence of other means of FTL travel besides warp. So it seems you still need a lot of fanwaking (adding your own ideas to explain stuff that the show never tells you) to make it all make sense.
The show lost me at the end of Season 1 when Michael sided with the Empress, a horrible person with no redeeming qualities, over Captain Lorca who, while admittedly evil, was actually a decent captain who seemed to care about the crew of the Discovery. But supporting the Empress (who, as you recall, ate people) served Michael’s emotional needs, and that was what’s important.
I should have quit there, but stuck around for another season an a half out of inertia.
The thing is, you have to earn emotional catharsis. You have to do the work. You can’t just go around shouting “Feel this!” in people’s faces, which is what the show usually did.
Yeah, whilst other series in the franchise can probably be criticised for repeating a generally technical-problem-of-the-week format, that was not out of keeping with the show; To Boldly Go; overcome the difficulties of exploring space, Discovery seems to lean way more heavily on emotional-problem-of-the-week. i.e. To Boldly Feel.
Edit: And this gets tiring. I can watch people solving problems all day and find it exciting and inspiring, but watching a show unload its emotional baggage on me week after week just makes me feel like it’s a job. You’re making the audience into your therapist.
Good point, but I’d like to add: classic Trek didn’t just deal with technical problems, it also dealt with moral and ethical problems - which Discovery, in turn, rarely bothered with. Morals and ethics are a lot more interesting than emotions, IMHO.
Yeah, I think maybe because if you feel like you have wrestled with a moral/ethical quandary - there is usually a payoff - your viewpoint is changed, or affirmed, or at least you recognise that it’s a situation that has complexities you perhaps weren’t thinking about.
Other people’s emotions can be like that too, if you already have other reasons to be invested in their story, otherwise it’s just exhausting and at the end, there’s nothing except that exhaustion.
I literally found myself saying “Oh FFS what is it NOW?” at the screen, over and over, when trying to watch Discovery.
They declared their main character to be the never-before-heard-of sister of the most famous character in the entire canon and then ran into continuity problems? Say it ain’t so!
She was Spock’s adopted sister. And her long-lost mother was a brilliant scientist whose time-travelling experiments impacted the entire galaxy. And she was the doppelganger of the heir to the Mirror Universe’s evil empire. These three facts were not connected to each other. She was Just. That. Important.
That was what finally got me. There was an episode where one of the bridge crew dies, and they wanted us to feel all hurt over … what was their name again?.. dying. But they’d never really made that character stand out in any way that their death would make the audience legitimately sad.
Compare that to The Firefly movie. “I am a leaf on the wind”. Man, that one was a shock, because we actually knew the character, and wanted them to survive.
Misogyny? Have you ever heard the term “Mary Sue”? Or “Marty Stu”, in relation to badly written characters that are obvious wish fulfillment for the author? That they are always the bestl brightest crewmembers and everyone wants to be their friend? I can’t use “Michael Stu”, because THAT would be misogynistic. Michael Burnham IS a woman, you know.