- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/19356345
I finally got around to watching some Discovery (though I’m only through the first few episodes of season 4). My thoughts:
- First three are a moderately enjoyable sci-fi drama
- I have to admit, season 3 just presented enough interesting ideas and mystery I was able to ignore most of its flaws
- I’ve really started to notice death by subplots, though. It feels like they try to do 4 different plots in an episode, 2 which they do okay and 2 which are way weaker than they should be. I would have rather they done 2 subplots really well.
- I felt season 4’s conflict was really contrived. The plot could have almost written itself with what happened in season 3. Osyra died and we don’t even talk about the aftermath in the Chain - the slavery isn’t just going to magically disappear, and there’s sure to be a power struggle. Also, killing Book’s family was kind of idiotic - talking about grief and obsession again is like beating a dead horse. Heck, if you’d let his family live but still destroyed the planet, we could have had an interesting story on diasporas instead.
- Also, background character development feels a bit weak. I spent half the first couple seasons wondering who the heck Ariam was, and just when I did, they killed her before the audience could develop much of an attachment. They could have at least thrown in a few more crew barbecue scenes.
- I am now more impressed at what Lower Decks did with fewer, shorter episodes a season than Discovery. They really managed to create a sense that we’d been with these characters a long time and that they were growing despite the entire show being shorter than 1 TNG season. I do have a few gripes about season 5 (my main one being how does Ma’ah go from “Beckett is honorable” like, a few hours after meeting her to immediately distrusting her in the finale), but my respect for LD has only grown.
I think the biggest flaw with modern Trek series is that they spent more money and time on the imagery, picture, special effects and action scenes and presentation rather than on the actual story, writing and dialogue.
The old James Bond films were famous for this. In some of the films from the 60s and 70s, they first created the stunts and action scenes and wrote the story around them. In the end, they looked great fun and exciting but didn’t mean much to the audience. It’s a fire works show … it looks neat but it’s forgettable the next day.
I also think season-long plot arcs with basically nothing else is just not the way to do Star Trek. Star Trek is inherently episodic. It’s about going to new places all the time. Even DS9 and Enterprise found ways to make the shows episodic and have a plot arc.
Discovery is the only Star Trek show that does not embrace “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations” except on rare occasions.
I’m not going to say “it isn’t Star Trek.” It’s Star Trek. It’s just Star Trek that was absolutely not in the spirit of the rest of Star Trek and I doubt Gene would have approved of it.
It doesn’t help that the show makes more sense if you assume the crew inhaled the magic space shrooms.
They don’t even do the effects and presentation right, because it’s nearly impossible to see what’s going on through all the post-fx filters and flares. Somehow it’s simultaneously too dark and too bright at the same time, so a lot of the VFX shots just turn into silhouettes with too much bloom.