Star Trek

And at this point, the extended crew of the Discovery was thoroughly sidelined: Burnham's personal relationships took priority over everything else.

This is the part that I’ve never got on well with in Discovery.

In TNG, it’s not a show about Picard, or Riker, or any of the other individuals. It’s a show about the crew. I’ve even seen it said that the actual star of the show is the ship.

Whereas, with Disco, it’s a show about Michael Burnham and everyone else has a bit part. That always felt weird for a Star Trek show. I want to see how the crew works together to solve problems and overcome things with everyone on an equal footing regardless of their rank in the show.

And I think that’s why there was such a warm reception to season 3 of Picard. It brought the crew back together. Picard alone isn’t satisfying enough. What we wanted was him as part of the crew.

I'll disagree with a couple of points here.

the time jump into a future that absolutely does not feel like it’s a thousand years ahead of the previous season. The jump in technology should be proportional to a Viking longboat rocking up to the ISS, but it felt like a step back.

This presumes that technology always develops at the same pace (it doesn't), and also ignores the two major cataclysms that the Federation endured, in the form of the Temporal Wars and the Burn. And even then, we see that the technologies we're used to are faster and more efficient (the transporters are absolutely nuts), and we've seen new developments such as programmable matter. The pre-Burn Starfleet ships we've seen look like abstract art installations, and I think they absolutely look like they're well beyond anything we saw 900ish years prior.

As for Burnham...while it's indisputable that she's the main character of the show, the entire principal cast gets plenty to do - much more than they tend to get credit for, which is a shame. They're a great ensemble.

I love it when they try to take risks and do something new or different with the IP. Even if it fails, the end result is still usually more interesting than a safe retread would have been. Disco isn’t my favorite Star Trek, but it is one of the most interesting entries in the franchise, and has done a lot to expand and solidify the 23rd century canon.

People forget how controversial the Battlestar Galactica reboot was. Same goes for Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Simply being different from the source material is not enough to make it bad. Discovery isn’t as good as either of these, but i’m glad it tried.

Yes, exactly. Season 1 knew what it wanted to be. When it was over, I remember thinking "alright, not bad, I'm excited to watch this show grow the beard."

But it never did. In retrospect, Season 1 is the strongest season the show had to offer. Each subsequent season got a little worse as plots got more confusing, themes got more muddled, and no breakout characters emerged to carry the show through an abundance of narrative turmoil and worldbuilding strangeness. But above all else, seasons 3 and 4 are just boring. I don't care about the crew or their mission. The most interesting characters are consistently the outsiders: Pike, Vance, Rillak. I'll be watching season 5, but mostly out of a sense of obligation and morbid curiosity.

As much as I like SNW, it's still not quite the show I've been waiting since 2005 for: seven curious officers on a ship called Enterprise set in the mid-25th century. I worry that SNW has robbed us of the opportunity to see the classic formula set in the immediate post-TNG era... even though that seems to be what season three of Picard was explicitly setting up.

I'm not a huge fan of Discovery but I do hope we can get a balance between bold and new and the sort of nostalgia bait we're in now. I mean, I love SNW, and it's really filling out some canon gaps (love Uhura getting some real attention) but I really want to get away from cameos. They felt cheap in Disco S2 and they're still cheap in SNW, but the writing is so much better it's forgivable. PIC and LD are also very rooted in referencing old Trek. Hell, even Prodigy couldn't resist making Janeway a (sort of) main character.

This is why I'm low key hyped about the Academy show, and am hoping it's with Tilly in the far future. Give us Disco's great, inclusive cast as peripheral characters, maybe even flesh them out more, but shift the focus to a class of cadets working as a team. Get back to that optimism and away from Burnham and whatever's destroying the universe this season, without needing to root the show in old Trek.

I have a tendency to wait for seasons to be completed before marathoning them, with a few exceptions. The problem with that approach is that I can fall away from shows as new ones come out, and forget to circle back. Despite being a huge Trek fan (I can’t estimate the number of times I’ve rewatched TNG, DS9, and VOY), I’m behind on all of the new Treks.

I am a fan of Michelle Yeoh. She’s one of my favorite actors, and I’ll go out of my way to watch whatever she’s in. Stamets was a favorite character, and more often than not it was his plot lines that pulled me along into the next episode. I mean, I’m a biologist with mycophobia, and I still obsessed with his personal, romantic, and scientific journeys.

I just could not get into Burnham, though. One of the reasons I loved DS9 so much was that Sisko was about as close to a realistic military officer as Trek has come. I love Picard and Janeway, but Sisko was the only one who I felt could have been someone I knew during that stage of my life. There was still plenty of Trek going on, but when he got military, you could tell.

Burnham was the exact opposite. It was like every single decision point was where she’d do the least military and even the least Starfleet thing. I could throw around words like selfish or immature, but it wasn’t even restricted to that. And they were entirely broadcasted and predictable - I’d be watching and say “Oh, please don’t let her do X,” and sure enough she’d do X. This wasn’t a plot point or a flawed hero motif, it was built into the character.

I loved Milly. I loved Saru (love anything Doug Jones does). But Burnham was terrible, and the show revolved more and more around her. She wasn’t a femme Kirk or a woke Janeway. She was like a privileged 15 year old given command in a galaxy-spanning military/scientific/governmental organization.

I will make it back to the new Treks. I’ve finished all of my Taika Waititi shows, I just did my Nth rewatch of Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place, and I’m still a couple months away from redoing The Other Two. I need to scratch my sci fi itch. I just don’t know if I’m going to make it back to Disco before doing something else like SNW or Picard, or yet another pass through the old Treks.

I won’t miss it. The crying alien who caused the dilithium crisis was the final straw for me.

as much as I liked Pike and his crew in season two, SNW leans too heavily and knowingly on the franchise's campier canon for my taste (I know I'm in a minority with that opinion

There's a reason for that

I've read through two threads recently on DIS, and I have found nobody talking about S4. Did everyone just give up at S3? Did we all forget about "growing the beard" and how long it can take a show to get it's legs?

S4 is my favorite season of DIS. Species 10-C was some of the coolest new sci-fi for Star Trek in a while. The overarching plot was interesting in that it had high stakes, but it didn't feel oppressive like other seasons. It still had a sense of hope and optimism. A lot of the characters got to expand their roles and relationships, feeling more like an ensemble.

I know there was some stuff that didn't hit well in that season, but I can't recall the details off hand (like I can for S1-S3). In my memory, the good outweighed the bad.

I am hopeful that S5 meets at least that mark, and hopefully glides into a graceful ending for the show. If I had my wish, S5 would make a switch to a more episodic style (rather than a big season-long central plot).

I definitely agree with you. While I didn't like a lot of the elements of Disco season 1, it had a genuineness that was really compelling. Season 2 corrected the things I personally didn't like but kept the heart and soul which has made it some of the finest modern Trek in my opinion. Season 3 was alright I suppose, but didn't have that spark of authenticity. I'm dubious about anything more from Disco.

The big issue for me is also the show centering on Burnham. Season 2 put her along side Anson Mount's Pike which balanced the scale nicely and their personalities played well together, but other than that Burnham has always felt like the main character of a CW show to me. I don't know if it's the writing for her character or the acting, but she's a weak point of the show to me. Doug Jones on the other hand has been incredible and I could watch him play Saru all day 😄

Here's a controversial opinion for y'all: The season of Discovery with the broken remnants of the Federation examining how and if to bring back the Federation is the best season of Trek ever made, to date.

I also have mixed feelings about Discovery, but for different reasons. I love the characters and character writing. I disagree that the rest of the crew doesn't get any development - but a lot of that does come in later seasons. My complaints are about the plots. I think season 1 was the most problematic in that respect with progressive improvements over the next two seasons. (I haven't seen season 4 yet.)

• Overly ambitious arcs, and over-the-top stakes make the story feel unbelievable
• Discovery being the only crew able to address several civilization-threatening crises makes the universe feel small
• Leaning on action and artificial tension (like, the ship will explode in 3 minutes) is a cheap way to seek engagement that deprives us of time seeing the characters drive the story

We don't need constant threats of annihilation in the story to be engaged! The most compelling Trek writing has had much lower stakes. When we have had high stakes, like in The Best of Both Worlds and The Dominion War, the writers managed to make us feel like we were seeing a pivotal part of a much larger conflict. They took the time to build up to the big tension, and took the time to play out satisfying resolutions. And they didn't make it the entire show.

But things got gradually better,

I love Michael, and I enjoy watching her be great at everything. But she can be part of a larger society of amazing people, and still be amazing herself.

In season 3 things slowed down enough, and they spent enough time letting more of the cast develop and drive the story that I felt like I could enjoy the story without gritting my teeth.

I don't disagree with you about mirror-Georgiou's participation being unbelievable. The thing where everybody loves Michael to the degree where it becomes their primary motivation is too Mary Sue-like. Again I think that's at its worst in season 1. OTOH having Michelle Yeoh on the show is a lot of fun so I'm inclined to forgive the stretch in that character arc.