Goodbye, Farewell and Amen to Star Trek: Discovery
Goodbye, Farewell and Amen to Star Trek: Discovery
The show responsible for the reboot of Star Trek on television comes to an end.
On Thursday Star Trek: Discovery’s five-season mission came to an end, and the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has decidedly mixed feelings about it.
Premiering six years ago, Discovery jump-started a bevy of new Star Trek shows, including Picard, Prodigy, Lower Decks, and Discovery’s own spinoff Strange New Worlds. It has been around long enough to start on CBS All Access and end on Paramount+. And it certainly began with a hell of a bang:
The cast on this show — included at various times Michelle Yeoh, Jason Isaacs, Sonequa Martin-Green, Rainn Wilson, Wilson Cruz, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman, Tig Notaro, Doug Jones,1 and David Cronenberg2 — was stellar. The fx were state of the art. Some of the “Short Treks” it inspired were phenomenal.
The show tried to update Trek to 21st-century tastes in two ways. First, consistent with, say, Lost, Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse, it had serialized, season-long plot arcs. Second, it tried to be more emotionally vulnerable than previous Star Trek iterations.3
How well did it succeed in updating Star Trek to the current moment? Well… it is telling that its series finale generated decidedly mixed reviews. As one reviewer put it:
“Discovery” helped pave the way for a renaissance in television science fiction and for that, we are eternally thankful, but ... we won't be even remotely sad to say goodbye to black alerts, that damn spore drive, smartmatter, excessive flamebursts, detached nacelles, Georgiou's smug sniggers, Burnham's Bottom Lip™ and those crazy, cavernous turbolift spaces.”
NPR’s Eric Deggans was equally ambivalent:
For this critics, the last few seasons of Discovery have been a bit bogged down by the stuff that has always made it a tough sell as a Trek series: overly ambitious, serialized storylines that aren’t compelling; new characters and environments that don’t impress; plot twists which can be maddening in their lack of logic; big storytelling swings which can be confusing and predictable at once.
It is true that Strange New Worlds generated a stronger following and found its footing far more quickly than Discovery. The question is why.
Originally set a decade prior to the events of the Kirk/Spock Enterprise, at the end of Season Two the show took the ship and the crew a thousand years into the future to free itself from the shackles of canon. At the time I thought it was a smart move, but in the end it did not pay off for the reasons that Deggans listed above.
Why did Discovery never quite click? For one thing, the serialized arcs never really worked.4 That might be more of a Star Trek feature than anything else. Outside of the last half-season of Deep Space Nine, no Star Trek show has handled non-stop serialized arcs well. In terms of plot, the three seasons of Picard were also a total mess.5 Trek’s sweetspot, akin to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is to combine slow-boiling plots that pop up during an entire season mixed with self-contained plots-of-the-week. Discovery’s first season plot was bananas, its second season was ridiculous, and its final three seasons were all variations of “this could destroy the galaxy as we know it!” plots that got stale fast.
The serialized arc were a problem, but not the problem. No, the problem was that I could never shake the sense that this show’s real title should have been Star Trek: All The Feelings. These characters would experience trauma and then talk nonstop about the trauma, sometimes at wildly inappropriate moments — like during the middle of a crisis or an away missions.
The contrast to Strange New Worlds is marked on this point. The characters on SNW also have, you know, feelings and stuff. The difference is that they are able to keep them check in order to do what they have to do. The result is an effective balance of Starfleet professionalism and characters coping with their emotions. Discovery never quite found that equilibrium. Half the time I was watching Discovery I found myself asking “How am I supposed to believe that any of these characters graduated from Starfleet Academy?”
Perhaps the best way to think of Star Trek: Discovery is as an interesting but not entirely successful experiment in adapting Trek to the 21st century. But it is only through failure that one learns how to succeed. So for clearing the path for Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, I’m glad Discovery was able to fly.
Doug Jones deserves far more credit as a pathbreaking actor. He brings to creatures what Andy Serkis brings to CGI characters.
It was amusing that Cronenberg played a character who was the antithesis of any character who would be in an actual David Cronenberg film.
The show also featured queer and nonbinary characters, although that has been a feature in Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Lower Decks as well.
It is fitting that Discovery’s final season ended with the characters throwing away the MacGuffin that they had spent the entire season trying to find.
I mean, FFS, not everything has to be about the Borg.
Sad that civilizations that can travel faster than light have not learned to live in peace.
I grew up with the original Star Trek and have recently been making my way through the full series streaming on Paramount+ - Next Generation, Voyager, Strange New Worlds, though I haven’t tackled Discovery yet. Great stuff with all it has to say about leadership, teamwork and - IMHO, the major focus, diversity - or learning to getting along with those who are different, be they Klingon, Vulcan or Borg.