And always gonna be. Go cry about it some more
It isn’t the mushroom drive that made Discovery bad, it’s that Starfleet apparently no longer has any kind of standards.
TOS and TNG had all kinds of “woke” politics for their era, but they portrayed them as happening on a military vessel. People were calm, competent and followed the chain of command. The only time that broke down is when they were under the influence of some kind of alien disease or tech.
Discovery’s crew was full of whiny, fragile people that were barely able to do their jobs for all the time they spent obsessing about their personal problems. Tilly is the prime example of this. The “Tilly” equivalent in TNG was Reginald Barclay. Shy, stressed, lacking self confidence, etc. Barclay’s character arc makes sense for Star Trek. He is able to save the day, but he’s certainly not promoted because it’s clear that the senior officers on the show are calm, competent and project confidence. He’s basically there to show that not all Star Trek characters are the confident, competent, brave people who make up the bridge crew. And, by doing that they emphasize how elite the bridge crew is. Meanwhile, on Discovery, Tilly is promoted and keeps gaining responsibility despite never addressing these gaping character flaws. The “Tilly” message seems to be something like “it doesn’t matter if you’re weird, awkward and unable to communicate competently, as long as you love and accept yourself, you too deserve to be on the bridge making life or death decisions”.
Discovery also fails because that lack of competence is everywhere in the crew. The original shows had the crew acting as… well a crew. They’d tackle problems together. In TOS Kirk would lead the charge, but he’d never do anything on his own. Spock was stronger and smarter than anybody else, but he followed the lead of his commander. McCoy handled the medical stuff. Scotty handled engineering. In Discovery, Burnham is apparently the only competent person on the crew, and the only one not to be fazed when something bad happens, so rather than the crew working together to solve issues, it’s superhero Burnham while the crew faints dramatically. The only real exceptions to that are Saru (whose personality doesn’t really make sense given what they explain about his species), and Commander Reno, who is a breath of fresh air because she’s basically the only one who isn’t constantly freaking out – although the sarcasm and fatalism of her character is almost too much.
What makes it all worse is that the backdrop is that the universe is doomed and only Discovery can save it. Sure, the other Treks have had major threats to the universe, but they were being slow-rolled over a long season, or sometimes multiple seasons. They had room to breathe and do episodes that didn’t advance the plot. That gave them a time to do episodes focused on fleshing out the personality of a member of the crew, to do silly things, etc. Discovery has the whiniest, least professional crew that has ever crewed a starship (and I’m including Boimler and friends), who are whining while dealing with the most urgent apocalyptic scenarios. It’s a soap opera while the end of the world is playing out.
I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.
The only addition I have is the glorification/growth of Section 31. They were introduced as the baddies because they are the antithesis of what the Federation is. As a foil they’re at least a gateway to interesting variations on “do the ends justify the means” and "“are short term solutions acceptable while sacrificing long term ones”. Which the Federation classically would answer with a resounding “No”.
But sci-fi Black Ops is “cool” and The Expanse was popular so lets get on that bandwagon apparently. (I love The Expanse, but different things should be different.)
Sure, the other Treks have had major threats to the universe, but they were being slow-rolled over a long season, or sometimes multiple seasons. They had room to breathe and do episodes that didn’t advance the plot.
As a usual defender of Discovery - I absolutely agree here. CBS clearly wanted to do a Battlestar Galactica, just in case Star Trek was over.
As much as I like Discovery, I’ll admit I’m sure I would like it more if they had settled down from the constant universe ending a bit more often.
And the constant tearful goodbyes to characters that either don’t die or somehow come back from the dead.
Tap for spoiler
When they killed the cyborg girl, I felt absolutely nothing because they had spent essentially zero time on her character prior to that.
I have had fun with Discovery (wrapping up season 4 on my first time through), but it’s my least favorite series so far. I don’t connect with the characters nearly as much as I’d want, and I think that’s largely because every single moment is a universe-ending crisis.
No one character’s big sacrifice to save everything has any meaning when five minutes later the universe is ending again. There isn’t space for any real happiness in the plot. They don’t really do science. The scientific explanations of things are extra goofy.
Tap for spoiler
(“The data won’t let us delete it. Guess we can’t remove our computer storage, so we’d better destroy the ship. No, wait, let’s just time travel instead using a suit that we also said was impossible to make with our technology - but we’ll make TWO of them anyway using the magic time stones!”)
I very much enjoyed the Strange New Worlds cast joining the series for that season though (I wish we’d gotten some more Nurse Chapel time because I think Jess Bush is adorable.)
I like the set and costume work. I think the actors do a great job (just once I’d like to hear Doug Jones do Baron Afanas’ voice while in Saru makeup). There’s a lot to like about the show, and I think it was worth watching. I can’t see rewatching it anytime soon though.
And the constant tearful goodbyes to characters that either don’t die or somehow come back from the dead.
What the fuck are you talking about? I want you to name a single tearful goodbye to someone who comes back from the dead who isn’t Culber. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
The only thing I can think you’re remotely trying to reach for is Burnham’s mother but that hardly counts when she was dead from the first episode and basically written off until Season 2.
No one character’s big sacrifice to save everything has any meaning when five minutes later the universe is ending again.
That’s the gimmick of the show. They’re a rapid first response vessel to deal with imminent threats.
Question: Do character sacrifices not matter to you if its a show about special forces operators or other people who are in constant danger? Or is it just because it is Star Trek?
There isn’t space for any real happiness in the plot
Not remotely true. There are not as many episodes of Discovery as there are other shows, especially per season, so fat has to be cut. There are no more filler episodes and bottle episodes like in TNG and DS9 because that’s how television has evolved. Even Strange New Worlds is still pretty serialized from episode to episode, just less focused on it. But there is a fair amount of space for happiness in the show. You just don’t see it as much because there isn’t as much of Trek. Want examples? The dance party episode in Season 1, Burnham and Ash (until he goes insane anyway), Burnham and Book, Grudge, Tilly like 60% of the time, Stamets and Culber being on the same page partway through Season 3 onwards, Grey, Zora. Like I don’t know what you’re talking about at all. All of these characters grow and become far more happier than they were at the start.
They don’t really do science.
That might be because they’re not a science vessel that’s just floating around and going to do science. Because they were not built for that. However, science is quite important to the show and comes up with constant regularity. So much treknobabble and they’ve even added a shit ton more. So yeah. They do science.
The scientific explanations of things are extra goofy.
The Enterprise got pregnant. Crusher got fucked by a space ghost. Neural Gel Packs. Everyone being a walking carpet sample in the future. Translators being insanely inconsistent and work by unexplained magic. Heisenberg Compensator. I’m sorry dude, but Star Trek explanations are goofy as fuck. There is nothing about Discovery explanations that could be ANY more goofy than this bullshit:
I was running a neural scan and noticed some anomalous protein readings. I thought there must be some mistake, so I ran an at the Journal and amino acid sequence to be sure. But there it was again, the prion mutation rate had spiked. I couldn’t believe it. It meant the anomalous proteins had to have a strong quantum resonance.
The temporal surge we detected was caused by an explosion of a microscopic singularity passing through this solar system. Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in our hull into a high state of temporal polarisation.
It appears to be a highly focused aperture in the space-time continuum. Its energy signature matches that of the temporal fragments we observed earlier. However, it is approximately one point two million times as intense. I believe this may be the origin of the temporal fragmentation.
After we launch our target drone, the Defiant will have to generate a subspace tensor matrix in the twenty five to thirty thousand Cochrane range. Then the drone will send out a magneton pulse which should react with the matrix to create an opening in the space-time continuum.
he mad
Yeah, it’s almost like people making up a false narrative can be frustrating.
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I had to stop watching when an alien got really sad that one time and that caused all the dilithium crystals in the galaxy to blow up. It was just… Dumb.
At the same time, it was a very TOS plot and resolution, and Discovery is based on that.
Charlie X was a child who would have blown up the entire Federation, because he was upset that people told him “no”.
Lazarus nearly detonated the entire universe, and for at least one moment, caused it to cease to exist.
Which doesn’t gel with the post-TNG Trek, which is more scientifically grounded, but “child got given godlike powers and nearly wiped out the galaxy because they were upset” fits in perfectly with TOS. It’s just missing a reset button to put everything to rights.
Slight note but Surak didn’t have godlike powers and it was scientifically grounded.
The issue was that a child was mutated while in utero and born on a planet that is majority made of dilithium, a material that is connected to subspace, that sits inside of a massive cloud of radiation, cosmic gasses and other exotic compounds.
The childs mutation was to his vocal chords or whatever is used in Kelpians to produce sound. It was able to hit frequencies outside of the normal vocal range as well as being louder than normal. The frequency he was screaming was the resonance frequency of dilithium. The planet, made of dilithium that was being activated by the radioactive cloud, started a chain reaction where the frequency was passed through it. The frequency was blasted through subspace and any active dilithium that was connected to subspace (which it is when being actively used as evidenced in other Trek) was hit with the same frequency and detonated.
If you remove any single thing from that chain of events then nothing would have ever happened. Get rid of the child then everything goes as normal. Get rid of the cloud and the planet can’t transmit the scream. Get rid of the dilithium and there wouldn’t be anything to reverberate through.
People keep thinking that he had some magic scream but he didn’t. It’s just that he lived a life where screaming wasn’t common. He saw his mother die, the first scream, but after that all the holograms were taking care of him. He lived a quiet and rather mundane/simple life until the crew of the Discovery appeared. Then they introduce more stresses, as well as the holos breaking down, that push Surak to a point where he starts screaming again. But the loud, sustained scream caused by overwhelming emotional pain just never happened again. It really is as simple as that. Now, if the crew of the Discovery didn’t step in then the Burn would have eventually happened again. The holos would have crashed, he would have been left on a planet alone and life support eventually failing. He’d also likely see his mothers corpse again without any support which would further break him. At that point… yeah he’d probably scream a second time and destroy what little remained of Starfleet.
They even mention in Season 4 he isn’t a threat to anyone because he’s no longer on that planet. My guess is that they’d keep him away from active dilithium, but he’s not likely a threat to anyone anymore. I mean… dude could go terrorist on an insane level if he did so wish though.
If I remember right, it wasn’t sonic, but a psychic blast. The scream was just the usual “a telepath hits breaking point and explodes while screaming” Due to his biochemical links to the dilithium, it acted as an amplifier, and was momentarily rendered inert, which is extremely bad news when you have a bunch of stuff on the verge of constantly exploding, relying on a specific property of dilithium.
For us, it’d be like Q briefly snapping away the neutron absorption features of nuclear moderator rods. Things would go south extremely quickly, especially if no-one was expecting anything like that to happen.
Dude. I literally just explained what happened because you said that he was a God child. He was not. In any way. You are remembering completely incorrectly. There was never any mention of anything psychic being involved. They did, however, specifically layout frequency of the scream being the reason.
I feel like one of the main issues with Discovery is also that it’s much more serialised, and more compact, to its detriment.
There wasn’t an ambiguous downtime between adventures, or for things to happen off-screen, everything happened one after the other. We didn’t have space to develop and explore the characters, basically everything was plot, which made the emotional parts feel unearned.
The characters were rarely more than the bare minimum to enable said plot.
It hugely needed downtime it didn’t really get, and could have benefited from stretching out either the seasons or the episodes out to have them be more fleshed out and normal, instead of dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis. In all of three seasons, we had about a single segment of episode where they had any memorable recreation at all.
There was never an equivalent of the “The Doctor is a good singer, Worf hates children, Spock likes chess” moments for the Discovery characters to expand into between the big plot points. They don’t really have long-term flaws, or room to grow for the most part.
Discovery also fails because that lack of competence is everywhere in the crew.
I’d actually disagree with you on discovery showing a lack of competence. If anything, besides the attitude, it felt more like the characters were too competent. They didn’t have varied, specific flaws and weaknesses that made them seem more human, instead being universally omnicompetent.
Even TNG, otherwise a shining bastion of competency, worked best when the characters had individual flaws and weaknesses that they collectively mitigated by relying on each other, rather than everyone being perfect and good at everything.
Discovery lacks that kind of deferring to better expertise, and often comes across as Burnham does everything. Except when she’s coming up with a plan that will fix everything, there was barely any consultation, or back and forth. There wasn’t really ever a “I can think of something that could help, but have no idea how to execute it, anyone know how we might pull it off?”, or “That’s not a bad thought, but if we do it this other way, it might be better”.
basically everything was plot, which made the emotional parts feel unearned.
Unearned, and also shoehorned in. They were in the middle of a series of crises, and instead of just putting the personal stuff to the side until the crisis/crises were over they had to deal with personal soap-opera stuff in the middle of that. And, that meant that you couldn’t have personal character development that was low-stakes. For it to interrupt the crisis it had to be high stakes. That just heightened the soap-operaness because every emotional moment was high stakes.
Discovery lacks that kind of deferring to better expertise, and often comes across as Burnham does everything.
That’s basically what I mean about the incompetence. She had to do everything herself rather than consult with the rest of the crew, often breaking the rules because she didn’t have time to follow them because everything was so urgent. On every other Star Trek, the chief engineer would be consulted when it came to engineering things, the science officer when it came to science things, and so-on. But, because Burnham didn’t consult her experts, it makes it seem like they’re not competent enough to keep up with her.
So, these other crew members are involved when there’s a high-stakes soap opera scene where they bare their souls. But, they’re bypassed when Burnham has to take quick actions or the whole multiverse dies. Which makes it seem like this isn’t a crew of a captain, a science officer and a chief engineer working together to solve things. It’s a soap opera involving Tilly, Stamets, and Jett while Burnham saves the multiverse.
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This. All of this. Thank you.
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Still canon tho
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Not to worry, I’m sure future writers will ignore the inconvenient parts as hard as Janeway’s lizard babies.
Threshold is a dream that Tom Paris has. It’s the only way that episode makes any sense. This is headcanon, but I’m sticking with it.
I’m aware the events are referenced in Lower Decks. Tom Paris recorded the dream in his personal log which was later published as a memoir, and the dream story was taken out of context and misunderstood.
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Yeah so is TAS. Being canon doesn’t mean it’s good or even good for the universe of canon itself.
If I’ve never seen them, they don’t exist. Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks… none of it. I’m safe and pure.
At least give lower decks a try if you’ve seen the rest of trek, the references alone make it fun to watch. It’s AU it doesn’t taint the cannon but it’s still trek and a good time
From the clips I’ve seen, I can already tell you I don’t like the character designs or the humor.
Picard is elder abuse and I’m sticking to it.
Pop culture is mythology. You decide what’s canon.
Aside: Y’all think the Egyptians ever had arguments over which version of Horus was canon?
Absolutely. In fact they definitely had wars about it.
I try to console myself with the fact that Lower Decks is canon, too.
This might hurt your bones a bit:
MOOPSY IS CANON TOO
Remember when TOS had magic wand worms?
Remember when Spock tried to kill Kirk because he was sexually frustrated?
Remember when the USS Enterprise got pregnant?
Remember when Trip Tucker got pregnant?
I would be good at this thread, but I think we’ve gone far enough.
Suffice to say, we haven’t even mentioned Voyager yet. Lol.
Macrovirus. Enough said.
My wife and I are watching Star Trek for the first time ever. We’re on the 4th season of The Next Generation. So I’m not “in the know”. Should we not watch discovery when we get to that point? What’s wrong with it?
I love Discovery. You should definitely give it a chance.
It’s not perfect, and some of the complaints in this thread are completely valid, but I attribute the ferocity of the hate it gets more to the fact that it brought Trek back as a series after a very long hiatus, and took some pretty big swings as a result.
I was around when DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise were the new shows that “just didn’t understand Star Trek,” so from my perspective it’s all very cyclical. Trek fans, as with most long-standing fandoms, don’t all handle change very gracefully.
Trek fans, as with most long-standing fandoms, don’t all handle change very gracefully.
Should be shouted at every comic-con by the Star Trek cast as a reminder.
Honestly, it’s just a different tone. That’s about it. You should definitely watch it and decide for yourself whether you enjoy it, don’t let other people online decide for you.
I will say that the first season is a little rough around the edges but all Star Trek shows are. It gets better as it goes on. Tone, acting, writing. It all takes a slight tonal shift in the second season. At least there’s only 13ish episodes as opposed to the 24 of older shows.
It’s not wrong per se, it’s just different. I don’t particularly like Discovery and Picard, but they’re ok. They don’t have the same monster of the week approach as the others, and a lot of the other stuff has already been discussed here; lack of development of the crew and their relationship, the main character is constantly on focus while everyone else in the bridge is in rear view, no breathing room for proper character development, the orcs/klingons, etc.
I would rather watch Lower Decks, Prodigy or even The Orville. They’re closer to what I like about Star Trek (though The Orville takes a bit to get there).
I personally liked it a lot. I liked the fact that it broke from the style of the 90’s Trek series and did something fresh. But that is exactly what a lot of Trek fans hated.
Getting strong Sealab 2021 but live action vibes here.
strong Sealab 2021 but live action vibes
Now I want to see survey of people who loved Sealab 2021 and are apologists for Discovery. The venn diagram might just be a perfect circle…
I don’t, myself, disagree with any of the many complaints people have about Disco. My counter argument is just - I still had fun.
You’ve given me this revelation that I defend Sealab 2021 exactly the same way…
Doppelgänger!!
Everything except that one line about elon musk.
But in generall the concept of canon is completly overated. Like these are stories that are up to interpretation they not real. You can do what ever you want with that.
Its kind of interesting to see how some of those anti woke types loose their shit over this. (not just)
Anyways I can recommend jessie gender after dark’s video on this subject relatong to trek
Two lines. They had two elon musk lines and by far the worst part of the show
🙄
Wasn’t that line said by someone from the mirror universe?
Where Musk wouldn’t be a total fascist?
Yes but then Tilly is said to have gone to Elon Musk High School
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But in generall the concept of canon is completly overated.
You know, I wanted to disagree… But some of my favorite stories (especially Pathologic) make questions of canon a central story element. Sure, there’s still a canon you could arrive at, but the canon of your experience with these stories is what makes them endlessly interesting and mystifying to me.
And that’s not even to mention worlds like Dark Souls, Elden Ring etc. which deliberately allow for so much head canon that discussions are still going many years after release. None of this would work with strict canon.
hissss it burns ussss
Is that the guy who was in rent?
Yep. He plays a much larger role in DISC
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If Lower Decks added multiverses then anything can be canon or not canon according to the viewer’s preference! Want a multiverse that’s the same but Discovery doesn’t exist? Okay, that’s the multiverse whatever show is set in until such time as they explicitly bring it up.
That’s how infinite realities work!
So let me get this straight. You’re saying there’s a reality in which we’re all sitting in the holodeck of the Enterprise-D right now, debating the canonicity of the prophetic Discovery show produced hundreds of years earlier, while eating Gorgon soup with our hotdog fingers?
You got it!
And one in which we have burger fingers too!
My hot take is that Star Trek is actually a fictional show, and not 100% accurate historical documents at all! If this were true, we could all just ignore the parts we don’t like.
I know. No true Star Trek fan would believe this. Maybe I’m just losing my faith.
Heathen!!!
Hola, someone didn’t pay attention to the show
No. Not false. Just because someone else has a failure in basic video comprehension does not mean that Discovery is not canon. They just completely failed to understand what was happening in that episode.
Edit: Made even dumber by that link saying that Discovery/Section 31 aren’t canon but SNW is. Well, you see, SNW kinda came from Discovery. You don’t get to have one without the other. The pilot of SNW even aggressively states that they’re in the same universe.
But nope. Hateful lil bitch fans gotta hate.
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Last I read, it was erased from canon not too long ago.
The same phenomenon that turned the TNG era Klingon into a Discovery era Klingon also turned the Cerritos from a California class to a Galaxy class. So I guess TNG is also no longer canon.
It was not erased from Canon and I’m starting to lean towards banning that site on this community for outright misinformation.
It’s stunning how there are people who hate Discovery so much they will full on fucking lie about what is happening. It certainly wasn’t a misunderstanding because that episode makes it abundantly clear that Discovery was not erased from canon. There was a single fucking scene of the quantum rift changing a Klingon ship into a Discovery era one. That is the entirety of the proof that “Discovery was erased from canon.” Problem is that it doesn’t work because the quantum rift changes you into something from another era or multiverse. The only thing that scene did was temporally shift the klingons. Same way the klingons were temporally shifted and turned into a sailing barge. Both are part of Klingon history.
Just because some haterboy has a failure in comprehension skills does not mean that it was erased from Canon.
