I recently saw Star Trek Picard, the first season was okey, season 2 was awful, the season 3 was nice.
Acording some critics last Discovery season is bad, so now I’m afraid of looking a series who has a bad ending, it worth to watch or is as painful as Picard Season 2? Or I should watch Strange New Worlds and Enterprise instead?
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I’ll be honest, I can’t remember all my particular criticisms, but here’s my impressions that I have left:
It’d be more accurately titled Star Trek: Burnham, because 95% of the time, every problem or mystery is somehow related to Burnham, everyone else is just supporting cast.
Like Picard, each season felt very disconnected from the others, there’s some continuity, but you could almost name the season based on the feel of an episode.
Plots more often than not felt underwhelming, as they were solved by essentially deus ex machina, mcguffins, surprise reveals or abrupt character changes.
It was largely visually ok, actors all did at least a decent job.
I have 0 desire to ever rewatch a single episode.
I have 0 desire to ever rewatch a single episode
If there’s one thing I’d like to peek behind the curtain to see, it’s the streaming metrics for each trek.
My gut instinct is that almost nobody wants to rewatch it unless it is their own favorite trek. I know I don’t.
It’d be more accurately titled Star Trek: Burnham
I always called it ‘The Burnham Show, starring Michael Burnham’
everyone else fawning over how great she is
Did we watch the same show? She is literally demoted and sent to prison in the first episode.
@Corgana she did redeem herself.
You’re suggesting that redemption from disgrace is the same as “everyone else fawning over how great she is and what they’d do without her”?
@Corgana That’s what redemption is about. It’s recognizing that even the greatest among us make mistakes and can still be great.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim? I looked it up and I didn’t see anything about “redemption” necessitating the fawning over of the redemptee by others, so until someone claims otherwise I’m going to believe Mr. Webster.
@Corgana People fawned over her because she was a loving character who did great. That greatness emerged from her redemption and would have been lost to whatever the Federation’s idea of a prison cell in the 23rd century otherwise.
I’ve been on social media for a while and I have to say, this has all the hallmarks of a flame war. So this is all I’m going to have to say on the matter. You can throw darts at her photograph on your own wall.
Some people like it. Some people hate it. You’re going to have to make that determination for yourself. You’ll know by the time you get to season two which camp youre in
Personally I found the cast wasted on poor writing. And as someone else mentioned, the show concentrates entirely too much on Burnham. Half of the bridge crew you probably won’t know their names by the end of season one. There were a couple of bright spots — Saru’s backstory and character were well done.
My honest opinion is that Discovery is nowhere near as bad as its detractors say.
That said, I also wouldn’t call it good Star Trek and didn’t finish the final season.
It’s boring, not bad.
If it doesn’t make you want to rewatch it whole years later, it’s bad Trek.
I felt that way about Voyager at one time.
Watched the episodes once as they came out but wasn’t seeking to rewatch.
But then our kids came along, hit their preteens, and for them Voyager reruns on cable was ‘their Star Trek.’
I watched Voyager more with them during their preteens and early teens than I did during its first run.
And I can say that it DOES stand up to rewatch. More, it has many ‘best of trope’ episodes.
I think perhaps it was Voyager’s unevenness in quality across the entire run or, perhaps fatigue from hundreds of episodes of TNG and DS9 rewatched immediately after they were broadcast, that led me to not appreciate Voyager as much initially.
All to say, I was very wrong about Voyager’s rewatch value, and perhaps many crusty 90s Trek fans are wrong about Discovery too.
Don’t listen to the critics on the internet. If you’re not dying soon, watch it all. It’s Trek. It’s roughly 60% great, 30% mediocre to aged poorly, and 10% let’s never talk about it again.
I would go in rough order of release because they do like harkening back to stuff. Actually rewatching TOS will be good for SNW. And Disco S2 is its backdoor pilot.
Tell me more about this Star Trek that we are to never talk about
Code of Honor, Sub Rosa
Code of Honor, Profit & Lace, Sub Rosa, …
Janeway and Paris getting their lizard fuck on and having kids.
Watch Lower Decks. Not because it is itself part of that 10% – it’s the best new Trek there is! – but because it talks more about it. Technobabble, giant Spock, lizards, it’s all there. Even random toy tie-in schlock:
That one episode of tng where the aliens of the week were black people
Or the one where Dr. Crusher bangs the ghost that banged her grandma
I feel we talk of the bad episodes way more than the good ones. It’s more entertaining.
Discovery’s characters are somehow simultaneously boring yet also obnoxious jackasses. The writers of the show apparently thought Star Trek would be more interesting if everyone in the future had, instead of professionalism and humanism, histrionic personality disorder and chronic hemorrhoids.
Discovery is fine. It takes some weird turns, sort of a necessity since they chose to make it a prequel with a unique propulsion system. And it is not like the 90s shows. And there’s a vocal group of fans that hate it just because it’s different, it was the first show coming back from the long show hiatus, and many are simply incapable of admitting that.
Picard’s seasons are all weird in their own way and with their own flaws, totally separate from Disco.
Watch the first season and make your own decision. Star Trek fans are some of the worst for having outsized online hatred of shit that doesn’t matter.
The first season, and the first few episodes of season two take some extra weird turns because of the revolving door of producers during that period. The original producer left the show during season one. Then a duo took over who took the story in quite a different direction. Those two left in early season two. After that production finally settled into a more stable state.
Anyway the characters and acting are great, and that counts for a lot!
fans that hate it just because it’s different
Fans hated it not solely because it was different, that’s hardly a reason. They hated it because:
- For the first time, Starfleet officers were emotionally-stunted or plain assholes instead of well-adapted officers.
- The series revolved around a divisive character, hoping I guess that some people would become hardcore fans of Michael.
- It intentionally wrecked canon, even one of the producers proudly said he didn’t watch Star Trek to avoid preconceptions.
- Tech doesn’t make sense for its time. Practically none of it made any sense for a prequel, maybe if it had been a sequel.
- The forced linking of the main protagonist to Spock was unbelievable, more so because it somehow gave her Vulcan powers by osmosis.
- It promoted itself as progressive, but all it did was including a gay couple and a non-binary girl. The important characters were all cis, or left unspoken.
It wasn’t just different, it was bad. Really bad. It was like a vuvuzela in an acoustic song.
And this is coming from someone who watched a season and a half before quitting, but who loved Enterprise, who also had its glaring flaws, but was true to canon.
If I can present examples to you of those things happening in other Star Trek series would it change your mind about those other series?
Or does this list of criteria selectively apply specifically to Discovery?
You’ve said it, examples. All series have their flaws, but overall their qualities made them last. Who hasn’t heard of someone binging all of TNG? Who has heard someone say “Discovery was so good I’m rewatching it with my friends”?
Why is it when those things you listed show up on other Star Trek series you consider them to be “flaws” on an “overall quality” show, but on Discovery they become “reasons to hate”? Why the double standard?
Those are reasons to hate any show. Discovery made the mistake of being made mostly of that.
It just feels awfully weird to me that your list of criteria that makes a show “hateable” only applies to this particular show. And when another show checks off the items, the list suddenly stops being “hateable items” and instead becomes a list of minor nitpicks.
I just can’t figure out what the difference is, what could it be about Discovery in particular that would cause you to hold this list of criteria with such gravitas, but when the listed items appear on a different show, you don’t seem to mind? What could the difference be?
Again, let me explain it as a metaphor:
a) You want to buy a new house, it’s beautiful although there’s a few leaks here and there, but the rest of the roof is solid. You decide you like it.
b) You want to buy a new house, it’s beautiful although most of the roof has leaks. You decide it’s not wort the effort.
I don’t think Adira is a nonbinary girl, I think they’re just nonbinary. Their boyfriend was also trans for what it’s worth.
Georgiou is also pansexual, though that’s not particularly progressive (classic depraved bisexual trope), and Jett Reno was married to a woman.
So you’re right, most of the major cast is cishet. Even so, I think there’s more people who hate it for being “woke” than for being not progressive enough, as I haven’t heard the latter much but the former is annoyingly common from the usual suspects.
Also, as for “Vulcan powers”: we’ve always known that Vulcan logic is learned and not innate. Vulcans are naturally wildly emotional, their logic is basically just advanced meditation techniques, so it makes sense that a human raised by Vulcans could learn them. We’ve also seen non-Vulcans use the iconic nerve pinch before, it’s essentially just a Vulcan martial art and nothing to do with Vulcan biology. Picard and Data could both do it.
The only “Vulcan power” tied to their biology really is the mind meld, and that’s because Vulcans are mildly telepathic. Non-Vulcan telepaths could learn it too. I don’t think we ever saw Burnham initiate a mind meld though.
When I said Adira is a nonbinary girl, I meant she is female of sex and nonbinary of chosen gender.
it was a big deal when they announced her, but the treatment was milquetoast and timid. Same with the few non-cis characters, they were tokens, the show didn’t have the courage to depict a future where a diverse gender philosophy is widely accepted. They yellowed out of it and presented as if it was still our time. I don’t dislike the show for being woke, I dislike it for being shallow woke.
Same with the rest of it, it was 90% SFX and 10% writing. With long series like TNG you can afford the luxury of experimenting and fumbling the ball some weeks, it Discovery and Picard and massive productions that only have 12 episodes a year. They had to make every one of those count.
About Michael ‘s learned Vulcan powers, I don’t buy that. She was best than the Vulcans at their own academy, seemingly an expert at hand to hand combat, basically a prodigy at everything she wanted to do. That’s bad writing, super geniuses are too easy to write, so they had to make her emotionally immature to give her some challenge. Given she cried almost every episode, I’d seriously doubt she took to heart those meditation lessons.
It is a very flashy but bad show overall. If it hadn’t carried the name of Star Trek, it might have carved a niche in Sci-Fi, though. Space novels were called Space Operas after all.
I just don’t understand this “Vulcan powers” criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that’s a broader issue. I don’t recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.
And I find it very ironic that you’re complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn’t relevant to 99% of conversations so you don’t need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.
Frankly, I think Adira and Gray’s transness was handled quite well. I’m not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.
Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That’s a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.
The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their coming out scene is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren’t mind readers, and they haven’t replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it’s only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.
Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don’t know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that’s not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they’re talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they’re just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.
And Gray doesn’t have to come out at all, he’s accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!
I fully accept I have difficulty with using these pronouns. English is not my first language, and in my daily life I know zero nonbinary people, literally zero, so I don’t get to practice. I’ve only seen trans people on TV, or in discussions on the Internet, so I don’t get to practice those either. Sometimes I wonder why it’s such a prominent issue on the media, specially American media.
I know a handful of people that are gay or lesbian, but they’re not into choosing special gender pronouns. So my only practice before this discussion was another online discussion more than a year ago.
I suppose I’m confused what your issue with the trans characters is then. I thought at first you wished there were more, but now you’re saying you don’t understand why it comes up so often?
I understand the difficulty getting used to new pronouns. It’s great that you’re doing your best to understand despite not having much experience with it. I was just trying to point out that the portrayal in Trek is already showing a world that accepts trans and nonbinary people far more naturally than IRL, even if there could be more representation of actual queer folks.
Eh, it’s ok. I’d definitely rank it below many other Star Trek series, but if you’ve seen all the better ones already then Discovery is worth a watch
My position too. It’s not my favourite Trek by far, but I don’t get the hate.
Discovery is fine overall.
It may not be everyone’s favourite Trek but NO SINGLE SHOW IS EVERYONE’S FAVOURITE.
I’m stooping to yelling because, looking at it as someone who saw TOS in first run, it really can’t be stressed enough that there needs to be new Trek for every generation.
I didn’t expect that our GenZ kids would like Voyager best of the older shows.
And yes, for one of our GenZs, Discovery season one is ‘the best season of Trek’ ever. They have rewatched all the seasons of the show more than I have.
Discovery season 5 was fine in my view. I wasn’t fond of the series tacked on to the finale.
Season 4 of Discovery has a better premise and structure than Picard season 2 but both seem to suffer terribly from being shot under COVID restrictions. Other shows managed to write around the limitations without such stilted and drawn own scenes. I don’t know what Paramount instructed its writers teams be it’s boggling to see these seasons against the rest now.
I’m Genz, 25 years old and like the Voyager.
I think if you’re looking for a recommendation, both Strange New Worlds and Enterprise are better than Discovery.
If you were ok with Picard season 1, at worst you’ll be ok with Discovery.
I will say that Strange New Worlds is technically a spinoff of Discovery, so a watching Discovery first makes more sense if you’re planning on watching them all eventually anyway.
Discovery has good episodes, but probably more bad episodes than good episodes. If you’re binge watching, which you can do now that it’s all been released, it won’t be so bad. If you watch a bad episode, you’ll come across a good episode soon enough. When we had to watch week to week, it was rough going bad after bad, week to week.
i think this clip really highlights all the issues i had with discovery.
kinda poor acting, cringe ass dialogue, boring and bland music, self aggrandisement, and too many obvious cgi ‘set pieces’.
new trek is action oriented space opera, not hard scifi morality tales. ig its just not for me
I watched all of Discovery. It’s different, a bit too touchy-feely at times for me. But, the stories are interesting and wild.
OTH, I liked all of Picard, so maybe you shouldn’t take my view into account.
I enjoyed Picard more than I thought I would
Most any criticism of the show is true. I will day that it is a good series to watch with people who haven’t watched Star Trek before because it is a little un-Trek-ish and there is less to stop and explain. Also, since the mission is top secret it has little overlap with anything except SNW.
As a Star Trek fan, I was happy to get more Trek, the same as I was happy to get more Picard (that S2 was a pain though!), Lower Decks, Prodigy, and even the Short Treks.
My wife was pulled into the world of Star Trek by Discovery (a full 36 years after I’d started watching the franchise) and now she loves it and wants to watch all of the other series. So, Discovery gets a point for that.
(I haven’t seen Section 31 yet. It is supposed to be very bad.)
I love Discovery. Some of the criticisms are valid; every season has a few dumb moments that make me shake my head. But I love the characters, the actors are all great, Doug Jones in particular is a treasure, and the first contact in season 4 feels more like a proper science fiction scenario than any other in Trek.
One thing to keep in mind is that the tone shifts considerably season to season. It starts off quite grim and gritty, but don’t expect it to stay that way.
Discovery is fine and at the time it was the only modern Trek we had so there’s that, it’s enough for me to like it.
The only problem I had with it is that every season is “OMG we have to save the all fucking universe!”, other than that it’s cool.
Then we had Strange New Worlds so my thirst for “let’s just explore that funny planet and have a drink at the mess” Trek was satisfied.
I still watch discovery because ‘spaceships goes piou piou piou eat my phaser’ and that’s what I want it to be.
Discovery is my least preferred star trek I’ve watched so far, I mean, it’s not “bad” per se, it’s just different from the rest of star trek and has a different formula.
The thing with discovery is that everything happens really fast, there’s always a sense of urgency and hurry, but actual plot development happens really slowly.
Conflict takes a whole season to resolve, instead of standard one episode which you expect from a star trek show.
Also, I hate how the actors mumble instead of talking.
It’s not bad, it’s just not my favourite format.
