Star Trek

Season one has both a space 9/11 terrorist attack in the backstory and in the present story has a tactical nuke detonating above Starfleet Headquarters and both are shrugged off because ONE person was The Mole. Director of Starfleet Intelligence or not, the villains are not clever but given plot-superpowers. The Soong android colony, Borg artifact, "Destroyer" aliens and Fenris Rangers never come together in a natural way but just serve as filler material to justify the length of the season. Soji is introduced in the first episode with the audience knowing she's an android but she doesn't learn the truth (hell, suspect anything) until the sixth episode. In general it's a really bad idea to let the audience know more than the characters for that long.

Season two felt like it was changing its' premise every two episodes but got locked into a Time Travel plot and forgot what they were trying to do. They reintroduce the Gary Seven concept, an alien-sponsored guardian who is working numerous subterfuge missions to keep humanity on the right track, and they were given ONE job and told to just observe but not interfere? The final episode claims it's a Stable Time Loop, but it starts with an Alternate Timeline and they spend the entire season to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

Vadic is a recurring threat but not a singular threat. It's shown early on they are taking orders from somewhere else, so them as a danger is intended to be episodic and not the final confrontation.

I never denied season 3 was better put together. I just said it was awful and soulless and I stand by that.

Season One suffered from what I'm inclined to call Utopias are for Children (or the 90s) and the endless, fairly unpleasant to my taste desire to 'darken' the Federation. This is most obvious in some of the extra material on it, where the politics behind ending the support for the Romulan's is explained and it's this truly bizarre thing about a lack of support/industrial replicators for some of the newer colonies and anger over those resources being diverted to the Romulan support missions...which doesn't actually make much sense given what we're told about how that's being done.

Of course, the whole 'Romulan Empire is totally destroyed by a supernova or some random space anomaly' is just an albatross hanging on everything to do with them that touches on it.

It's not necessarily what the show was going for but it seems to me you wouldn't need to tweak s1 a lot for the emphasis to be less utopia are for kids and more a restoration of faith for Picard.

The finale is after all his faith in the androids being rewarded and his faith in the federation being rewarded when Clancy answers his principled call for help with a fleet.

Just emphasise the fact that Picard is wrong/overstating the problems with starfleet and though it's taken a body blow with mars (and yeah the mars plotline is awful no denying it) but at it's heart it is still Starfleet.

I remember every time the attack on Mars was mentioned, I kept chanting, "Please let Lore be behind it. Please let Lore be behind it." I don't even remember the how or why I thought it was going to be revealed, but causing a rogue synthetic uprising feels like a Lore thing.

Soval's actor just died.

Damn. RIP to Gary Graham.

Filming for the Section 31 movie has begun. Teaser image is Michelle Yeoh in costume with a clapboard.

I like Yeoh but never really took to Empress Georgiou and really don't like Section 31 getting the spotlight as heroes but maybe it'll surprise me.

I just wish we could have kept prime Georgiou as a Big Good (I'd also like to see Jason Isaacs as a proper Starfleet captain as well so the guy can do something different)

I think it's actually fun to see a classic scenery-chewing villain back in Star Trek.

Cant have a Big Good in a Darker and Edgier (said with a massive amount of scorn) series like what Discovery has tried to be.

Disco's come along way from season 1. I wouldn't call the latest seasons particularly dark or edgy if that ever applied.

There's even a consistent big good in Admiral Vance. Who seems generally really morally upstanding and doesn't even have the "has strong morals but" thing from Cornwell. Like, Vance isn't super gung-ho about doing good or using Discovery on a whim, but he's reasonable, willing to listen to his subordinates and doesn't let his ego get in the way. And being morally upstanding but reasonably pragmatic, especially in the context, is really smart.

Like, it'd be really easy to frame him as a total coward, but he really, genuinely wants to help and really believes in Starfleet, to the point of agreeing to the dilithium plan in season 4 and his response to the DMA moving in on Earth and Ni'var is to put Starfleet Headquarters itself at risk by using it directly to evacuate people. He didn't need to do that and would have been fully justified keeping the station out of harms way and using it as a muster point, but decided that saving as many people as possible was worth the risk.

I think the other element of seasons 3-5 is that the awful status quo has nothing to do with the Federation. It was a massive and horrific natural disaster, not a civil war or something like that.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 1st 2024 at 8:37:13 AM

Case in point, Vance's negotiations with Osyraa at the end of season 3. Where he listens and agrees with her points about the benefits of an alliance if the Emerald Chain goes straight and is prepared to go along with it on the condition Osyraa herself takes responsibility for past crimes and under goes a fair trial.

It's also worth noting that the very first thing we see the 31st century Federation doing is trying to cure a plague afflicting a species that is, IIRC, not actually a Federation member. They have really limited resources, but while they aren't willing to sacrifice them for nothing, they're still fully active in helping everyone else to the best of their ability. The only reason they're resigned to not being able to cure it is that they know what to do...they just don't have the time to do it because it's too far away.

They just don't want anyone knowing their exact location without being invited, which is fair enough.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 1st 2024 at 9:33:52 AM

I think most of the problems with Discovery can be traced to all of the Section 31 / Black Ops focus, it's extremely difficult to pull off dark character drama when the stakes are the survival of The Federation/The Entire Galaxy. The espionage stuff just sort of happens as a matter of course, while the characters argue over their emotional trauma and interpersonal problems. Season three and four were better for finding a stronger voice, but still suffered from the scale they were trying to operate at.

If the Section 31 movie tries to treat them as a type of N.G.O. Superpower with crazy spectacle I'm not going in with high hopes, we need more old school espionage Mission: Impossible and not another adrenaline action Mission: Impossible Film Series.

The irony is that Picard and Kirk would have agreed to pardon the Chain's leader in exchange for peace.

Star Trek: Discovery season 5 comes out April 4, 2024. This will be the final season, with 10 weekly episodes.

So it's not getting seven seasons, huh? That's too bad. I imagine the announcement of the spin-off so soon might have something to do with it.

At least it got one more season than Enterprise.

The seven season thing was more of an unofficial standard set by TNG rather than the expectation. Some rumors say that TNG was looking to wrap up in season five after the launch of DS9 but the actors were still game for a couple more seasons and simply felt more ready at season seven. "Time's Arrow" was commissioned to be a big two-part season finale / season opener in order to dispel those rumors. The entirely new creative and executive teams meant it was unlikely to be adhered to, though one is always hopeful for as much as possible.

Plus shows were already starting to reduce episode count per season by Enterprise, and streaming ended up adopting the cable format of smaller episode counts filmed in sequence rather than in batches. Even the biggest streaming shows typically only get about five seasons.

Star Trek Borg; the FMV PC game from the 90s, has been turned into a free browser game

Cool experience, though I'm not used to seeing the footage as anything but 240p You Tube re-uploads.

Kenneth Mitchell, who played Kol, Kol-Sha & Aurellio on Discovery and voiced several minor roles on Lower Decks passed away last week at the age of 50. He'd been diagnosed with ALS and kept working despite it.

Season 2 of Picard was rewritten after Paramount said it was too Star Trek.

...

Yeah, what they describe changing in Season 2 though sounds more like Man in Black than Star Trek.

Still interesting. Looks like they did considering bringing in or at least explaining Jurati's Borg in S3 and then decided no-one cared.

Fuck that, I cared.

Still Matalas seems more self-aware about the show than I realised, at least the problems with S2.

Law of averages does mean someone had to care, statistically speaking.