Or that Seasons 3 and 4 and 5 were a terrifyingly large Holodeck Program run by Tom Paris to see what would happen if the U.S.S. Discovery arrived in the 32nd century and that the U.S.S. Discovery was teleported back to the times of the Iconians?
There’s a lot of “emotionally” in that article. Kinda fits the series that was over-filled with emotional crap. (tbf, I aborted watching somewhere in Season 3, so maybe that changed afterwards. But I doubt it.)
yea, love it or hate it, Discovery did not really change its core vibe. I think I had hopes it would in season 3. Season 2 had already played with different vibes with Pike/Spock etc. And the idea for the premise of season 3 was so bold (and which I think is the best and most forward pushing premise of Trek since Next-Gen and DS9) that I figured something new was in stall. It seemed so at first … but then wasn’t really IMO.
From what I understand in television writing it was a constant struggle of “should we write a cliffhanger hoping it gets us renewed” to “we should have some closure in case we get cancelled”, since many writers had no idea what would happen.
I don’t think we know of a case where it convinced a studio executive, but then again we know very little about the reasons why some shows get renewed and some don’t.
We do know cases where ending on a cliffhanger helped drumm up enough fan engagement to reverse a cancellation (timeless on nbc is a recent(ish) example for that)
ENT’s trip to 1944 between seasons 3 and 4. Or in other words what must be the writer’s “you made us make this temporal cold war cake and by koala we are gonna make you eat it” letter to the execs.
Was the show doing well at all? I appreciate that I might just be in my own little bubble, but I don’t know a single person that loves this show. Some people like it, but it’s always a milquetoast endorsement, like “It’s not bad” or “It seems like a good scifi series but it feels like Star Trek fan fiction”, etc.
I’m surprised they didn’t at least strongly suspect it was the end.
Especially when compared to Strange New Worlds, which is an, imo, amazing Star Trek series.
I personally might have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been (seemingly) shoehorned into the Star Trek universe. I understand it’s not a very subjective metric, but Discovery just didn’t feel like Star Trek.
It comes across as if someone producer got pitched a sci-fi series with the plot of Discovery and thought, “This is great! It would be even better if we slapped Star Trek all over it!”
I bailed on DSC back when season 2 was airing. Specifically, Project Daedalus was my last episode. Later, I tried watching it again and trying to enjoy it more on its own merits, ignoring the Trek branding and whatnot. I wanted to bail again at the exact same point. I don’t know if it’s a too many cooks situation with the constant showrunner turnover or if the writers’ room just has an obsession with melodrama, but at no point did it feel, to me, like there was a good show hiding in there.
What I saw was ok from a plot perspective (for me). So the whole premise was nice and to me it fit into Star Trek. But as I just complained in another comment: I couldn’t cope with the amount of crying and the way they forced drama into the story.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off. Also the other officers. I should believe that these are the best of the Star Fleet, top of their class, trained for war but then they falter in the middle of a mission because their lover/friend/whatever gets hurt or dies? That just doesn’t fit.
Maybe I zoned that out from previous Star Trek (because it’s been a while …), but in my mind the characters there were a lot more stable and professional. They all had their individual quirks and mannerisms, but during missions they more or less got their shit together.
There are a lot of bad trek episodes scattered across every series. Bad episodes isn't the issue with Discovery. The issue is that, throughout all of trek, the crew has come together and stuck with each other through thick and thin. If there ever is inter-crew strife, it's solved in generally one or two episodes (except for major plot/story themes like the Maquis, or Seven being a Borg).
Discovery, on the other hand, is a show where the crew was constantly backstabbing, betraying, lying, and being all around bad towards each other. There was no finding solace among the crew in a world filled with strife -- the world was strife, and the crew was also strife. And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
It’s almost like those “filler” episodes in all the previous series actually had a function of allowing the series’ interpersonal relationships to gel and solidify. When everything is always an emergency and everyone must react RIGHT NOW OR ELSE it tends to wear people out. There’s nothing wrong with missions that just go somewhat routine and people get to interact with strange and interesting people from entirely different situations and places.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off
No, that part feels very, very on to me. Burnham was a human girl who was witness to family being brutally slaughtered (as far as she knew/could tell) who was then placed in the care of a Vulcan man who liked living as a sociology experiment. This is a person who is traumatized from a relatively young age, and who has no idea how to cope with her feelings. She's never received therapy, only more psychological abuse.
The issue I ended up having with the show is that the show itself never addresses this. It's actually pretty clearly the setup for the entire series, but no one ever acknowledges that Michael needs help, no one ever tries to get her any, and, in the end, she never gets the help she needs. They took what could and should have been a character arc about healing from abuse and just turned it into "SMG's pretty good at crying".
Once it became clear that the show had zero interest in examining its inciting premise, I lost all patience with it.
I like it as well, yet I didn't find a place in Trek forums until I left Reddit last month. So this is new territory for me. Take it in stride, there are other Discovery fans out there.
Greetings fellow DSC fan. I like the show, too. Considering that Paramount+ kept it going for 5 seasons, a lot of other people watched it. While I’m a fan of the show, I don’t think it’s perfect, and I can respect other folks critiques of the show. But sometimes the vitriol generators go so long and strong, it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise with DSC criticisms.
Really depends on the site, the time of year, and the specific topic. The Trek subreddit, for instance, tended to be pro-DSC when a season was airing and anti-DSC between seasons. Even here, that recent thread on the DSC Klingon redesign was very in favor of DSC.
Y’know, if I had a nickel for every time Jonathan Frakes was involved in a Star Trek episode that unexpectedly became the series finale, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
I’m watching the first season of TNG now with someone who’s never seen it before. That’s forced me to look at the series with fresh eyes. One thing that strikes me is that TNG took a lot of risks in the beginning to make a new kind of Star Trek. I see the Crushers as one. Some risks didn’t work out as well as others, but Star Trek overall benefited. IMO, it would be edifying revisit Dr. Crusher and see more character growth like in Picard.
Wesley’s mom, a main character, was initially going to be the ship’s teacher. They shifted her over to the empty doctor position without changing much about her. Then they made a new teacher who was also changed to be a bridge character, as the ship’s pilot.
While Riker and Troi are adapted from Decker and Ilea, Beverly was more extrapolated from yeomen Colt, Smith, and Rand.
Edit: specifically, their bios were mostly about a potential relationship with the captain, how competent they were (making them reasonable mates for him), and having the “walk of a striptease queen.”
Barclay’s actor has become a truly odious person in real life –– I don’t think the TNG cast (Stewart in particular) would have agreed to have him on the show.
Yeah, sadly that’s my impression as well. I really like his acting style and remember him especially for this scene. But it’s not easy to separate the artist from his art.
Probably not need but it would be helpful when determine where to apply what limited resources (time, staff, ship location) is most needed for a given mission
That’s true but I would think that the career path to captain would be more agnostic. Starfleet would benefit from having captains with tactical backgrounds, scientific. Backgrounds etc.
Great to know! There are more novelverse fans here than I think we realize.
I don’t know if the mods (@ValueSubtracted ) would be up for it but I’d love to have some of the authors with a fediverse presence to come over for an AMA sometime.
We’re definitely open to it, but aren’t usually in the habit of hounding people over it, if you know what I mean. As we become more established, we might be able to make some organic connections, and follow up on some from the Reddit days.
As for a Treklit community…it’s probably too soon for one, but the best way to make the case for one is to have a lot of Treklit engagement in c/startrek. We want to see that in general, which is why we’ve been trying the weekly comics post.
We usually wait to get the omnibus editions rather than order one by one. (Our local independent comic book store does better with special ordering those although they carry the occasional individual issue.)
So it’s good to get user reviews to help decide which ones to invest in.
I’ll try to get some book reviews up of the new releases. We got in all the Prodigy books as a show of support, so I was planning to give them a quick read.
I can’t quite imagine how the TNG -> Picard timeline for her works out given this, presuming this is meant to fit into the same timeline. Can someone who knows the comics universe lay it out?
Alternatively, some of the best episodes of TNG were “bottle” episodes to fill space and keep costs down. If 90s trek had shorter seasons would we have had “Measure of a Man” ,“Duet”, or “Masks” made?
I know the days of a 24 episode season are long gone due to the increase of production time in modern TV, but maybe we could have 13 to 15 episodes ? Enough for a 10 episode dedicated season arc with a few others just to explore some weird anomalies that make no sense at all.
I said pretty much the same in a comment above, but I’m not against filler, or bottle episodes, though I may have come off that way. I’m just against bad filler, stuff that would have never made it into a show if there was no predetermined season lengths. In a perfect world, it would be great if stories could be chosen simply because they were great stories. I’d like to know that something like the Fly episode of Breaking Bad would could still be filmed just because the show runners thought it was a great story, and not because they had a make a certain number of episodes and needed to save some money on one episode so they could spend more on another.
Honestly, I think there should be some really corny/goofy “what were they thinking” clunker episodes. Not lazy writing that disregards established character traits or contradicts itself or anything, but something they try that doesn’t work, but they tried in earnest and it shows.
Something that reminds you of the participatory nature of suspension of disbelief.
Not sure I’d put Masks alongside Measure of Man or Duet. Or indeed have it as an argument for filler episodes.
Given TNG never had much character serialisation, I’d say filler is more like those DS9 and ENT episodes late on that never fit I to anybody’s arc. Like the holosuite ones. Some amazing ones from DS9. Some less so from Enterprise.
But SNW has a good balance between episodic and serialisation. All this comes down to can they keep up the quality on greater volume. That needs more investment at a time when Paramount is cutting back…
Yeah Spiner’s acting in that episode is great, it’s a bit ridiculous and over the point but I believe that that was intentional, and I am not holding it against the episode
screenrant.com
Oldest