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I Just Watched Discovery
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I signed up for the free trial of CBS all access Thanksgiving weekend. I wanted to give Discovery a chance.
In short: I liked it.
Yes, the Klingons looked odd. Yes, the tech was too high-tech. Yes, they inappropriately and needlessly inserted the F-word. But it is still worthwhile and good for watching.
I think people get caught-up with the style difference between shows. This one has an over-arching story line and a main character to follow. These are modern story structures and don't affect the Trek-ness of Discovery.
Discovery still holds the basic Trek ideals. When a character goes against the ideals, that character discovers how bad it is and how good the ideals are. That's actually the point of the season storyline.
I liked it, but still like Enterprise and DS9 better. (Though I feel it fair to say it is better than Voyager.)
In short: I liked it.
Yes, the Klingons looked odd. Yes, the tech was too high-tech. Yes, they inappropriately and needlessly inserted the F-word. But it is still worthwhile and good for watching.
I think people get caught-up with the style difference between shows. This one has an over-arching story line and a main character to follow. These are modern story structures and don't affect the Trek-ness of Discovery.
Discovery still holds the basic Trek ideals. When a character goes against the ideals, that character discovers how bad it is and how good the ideals are. That's actually the point of the season storyline.
I liked it, but still like Enterprise and DS9 better. (Though I feel it fair to say it is better than Voyager.)
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DB spat out a huge load of libel and slander against Burnham with that event where she was the Fun Sponge.
Saru - yes
Lorca - obviously
Stammets - definitely
Tilly - yep
Georgiou - maybe not, but...
Mirror Georgiou - yes
Voq - yes
L'Rell - yes
Tyler - yes, until the last couple episodes
Culbert - no, but only barely
I liked the series. It's just that Burnham and Culbert seemed little better than "necessary to tell the story." Here's to hoping for development of bridge crew characters and another good story line in season 2.
One of the things I thought they did really well throughout the season was to bring Burnham from that outsider state and help her rediscover her own humanity. At the end, she's the one who speaks up and objects to Starfleet's plan to attack Qo'Nos and commit genocide, arguing, "This is not who we are."
Any of our previous leads would have given the same speech, but it felt more earned to me coming at the end of fifteen episodes of watching Burnham's understanding of who we are--and who she is--evolve. And I think thematically, it makes a lot of storytelling sense that she got there in part by having to navigate and survive the Mirror Universe.
In the moment, especially early, things don't feel like the Starfleet and Federation that we know. It is jarring. But at the end, the whole thing is about sussing out what our values really are and how we're going to apply them and live by them, and I can't think of a more Star Trek story to tell than that.
Crew is all interesting, i liked Lorca a lot, Burnham is good, Paul Staments & Tilly are both enjoyable.
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Look, I like Voyager probably more than the next guy, and Janeway is without question my favorite captain, but Voyager as a show was kind of bad. The cast was really good, the characters (for the most part) were excellent, but man the writing was just boring. There was SO MUCH POTENTIAL for that show, but by season 2 it was already a generic Starfleet show, complete with symposiums, diplomatic missions, etc. I think once it went away from the Maquis vs Starfleet and again away from the struggle to survive, it got very bland. Plus the later seasons were bogged down with insufferable doctor-centric episodes.
As for Discovery, I've never seen it, although I've read a few articles of late that makes me wonder if it will survive. Apparently and allegedly the producers got lazy and straight up stole the plot from a video game, and that video game's creator is in the process of suing. For that reason alone, I'm not sure at this point it makes sense to invest myself emotionally.
However, the McGuffin Drive and all plotlines associated with it must go.
I'll save my Voyager exigesis (it being my favorite series), as I know I'm in a minority and will never win that debate!
Yah he lost me, and any credibility with better then voyager line lol
It's my favorite too, which may have something to do with the fact that it's also the first one I watched. Or maybe, as ByloBand wrote, the characters were really good, I don't know. But I never found the main characters of any of the other ST series as interesting as the ones in Voyager, Discovery included. And I'm one of those who really liked season 1 of Disco.
Discovery is a totally different ball-game. I was actually on the edge of my seat for some of those episodes, and while I didn't like Burnham and there wasn't enough character development for the rest of the crew, the story was excellent. The Klingons were awful though, really awful.
Data is my favourite character, and The Wrath of Khan my favourite movie, by a long way. And I really enjoyed Enterprise, thought it was clever and interesting and could have gone much further given a chance.
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Yeah, Janeway is awesome, Chakotay was cool until he traded in his Maquis credentials for archaelogoy, Paris was always interesting, Torres and Seven were well developed, and the holo doc was great until he started singing operas.
This highlights the issue I have with the show, the style is different but that's the issue it divorces from what Trek is. Trek is about thought provoking science fiction and if I wanted/felt like watching a mindless soap then over to Star Wars I would go. Discovery is turning more into a Space soap opera, than a science fiction series.
I have been meaning to compile the issues I have with the show for a while, this post has jolted me, thank you. And I will try and keep this spoiler free, no promises.
The going against ideals is an underlying trope in Star Trek but the moment trope becomes integral to the plot/story line of an entire season that makes a weak series of stories IMHO - because there is nothing else that provides any depth to the story.
The spore drive is perhaps the only thing that provided something interesting but I don't think it's concept was expounded upon enough and I personally felt that introducing something like that in the early Federation years was a tad bit risky.
The Klingon War was not capitalised on enough we could have got far more detail on the Klingon houses, gone into the history of the Klingons more. I felt there were a lot of missed opportunities and led to a rather anticlimactic bizzare conclusion.
I am sure the spore drive can or will be expounded upon and hopeful that there will also be more depth to the Klingons but time will tell on this.
One can even argue that focusing centrally on one character itself goes against the Trek ideal - there was always a balance in the other shows, for me Discovery didn't provide this, and perhaps this intensity leaves the audience gasping for any character who isn't Michael Burnham.
Throw in a bit of Mirror universe keeps the entertainment going but it propped up a large proportion of the series. I may be overly critical and aside of some major goofs like the spacestation one it is still an enjoyable show as entertainment goes but it is just not Trek. It's just another space opera.
Chakotay was the only character that I found rather boring. He had almost no character arc at all, which might be the reason. But I loved all of the others, including Kes and Kim (well, Kim wasn't so interesting, objectively, but I still liked him
Chakotay was great in his own way, but he was always a catalyst rather than a character.
True, and I'm not one of those people who say Disco "isn't Star Trek", but that style was where it let itself down IMO. It failed to put together a compelling and well-paced over-arching storyline, and it failed to produce episodes that stood alone. It tried to keep a foot in two camps, and as Leonard Nimoy once told me, if you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.
Overall fine for a first season (and I didn't mind Tilly's swearing, but was shocked and appalled by Burnham's bad language in the following episode - completely out of character and absolutely horrific to witness), and I'm looking forward to better things.
I think that one of its weaknesses is that they tried to put too much stuff into it, they were chasing way more than two rabbits, so to say. But I appreciated the attempt to do something new, with the characters, the storyline and several aspects of the plot. To me, it was compelling.
I still think it was a weird choice to have a Vulcan-minded character as the protagonist, especially since the whole season was so action driven, with little space for character development. But in the end, for a first season, it worked pretty well and I found it very enjoyable.
Voyager, and again my opinion, is the show of missed opportunities. I chose my moniker because the character of Suder best exemplifies that; how cool would it have been to have him as a Garak-esque recurring character, testing the crew and Janeway at every turn, challenging thier beliefs and the "right thing to do" when his psychosis and almost Hannibal Lecter mentality can show them other paths to achieving goals?
Anyway, digressing a bit . . . once Discovery starts answering questions about the technology and starship design (I like 1 theory, but I won't go into it here) and Klingon appearance and other seeming contradictions, and when we see the full arc of tbe story, then we can judge and compare.
I had a hard time liking it right off the bat, given their treatment of Klingons, which seemed entirely unnecessary and felt like a deliberate "we're ST not ST" slap in the face. I agree with the OP that the tech felt too advanced. The early episodes were slow and boring on one hand, yet seemed to progress the plot far too quickly on the other hand, to the point that it felt like lots of good primary story potential was missed while also feeling as though a few secondary storylines (mostly Klingon) were painfully dragged out.
One of the things that made TNG, DS9 and Voyager so compelling was the individual character development, as well as the various relationships between crew members. I felt this was severely lacking in season 1 of Discovery. We got some development with Burnham, though I didn't really 'buy' some of her leaps of logic that defined her character. There was the beginning of a good relationship between Burnham and Georgiou, which came to a screeching halt, but that I'm hoping can come out via flashback in season 2. Aside from Lorca-not-Lorca and a bit from Saru, Tilly and Stamets, there was practically no character development at all, which makes it hard to feel any sort of connection to the crew. From just watching the show, you barely even learn the names of most of the bridge crew regulars, let alone actually get to know them.
A lot of the plots seemed recycled from the previous versions of ST that they were trying to separate themselves from. When you combine that with too many 'jump-the-shark' type plot twists (ie: deaths of main characters, no wait it's actually my evil twin moments, lets use the F-word because we can, etc...) that seemed forced and eventually lost the ability to impact, the show came across feeling a little rushed, disjointed and hollow. It was still quite entertaining, especially in the second half, but didn't really feel like ST.
Examples: Space whales, the planet that's somehow a giant subspace antenna, even the spore drive. Even, to an extent, the silly hologram stuff - you realize Sarek literally sat on her desk while he talked to her. All of this stuff is cool, but it's a little out of Star Trek's typical wheelhouse.
The thing is, every time they tried to include "realistic physics" - they butchered it horribly. The Klingon "beacon" - Someone said "a new star just showed up in the sky" - ummm, no. Light isn't instant. Discovery jumps into a star and they call it an "O-Type Star" - No, O-type stars are blue giants. It was obviously yellow-white and small. This is simple, anyone with a cell phone could have googled it as they were writing.
For the record, I have absolutely no problem with "re-imagining Star Trek" and changing up the design. As long as it's GOOD. Give me a great story that makes sense, and I'm on board.
Most of the people responsible for that are already out of CBS, eventually, it will be canceled by the utterly low number of viewers and how costly it becomes to CBS and NETFLIX, and removed from the canon and Star Trek once more will be something akin to intelligent plots and well-developed characters.
And of course without RADARs in space...
Space whales = fantasy.
Space probe that SPEAKS whale = A-Ok.
Got it.
I think my favourite thing about Star Trek fans is how they're not prone to hyperbole. They really keep things grounded.