halojedha | Star Trek: Discovery (Reply)

I've now watched all three seasons, and I have Opinions.

OK, so there are lots of reasons I am going to keep obsessively watching it

I love the unabashed "I like science!" nerd joy of the Disco crew, what a bunch of dysfunctional dorks they are. I'm constantly delighted by the number of people of colour, women and queers in the cast.
I heart the gorgeous queer family vibes of Culmets and their adopted tweens. (Yesss non-binary and trans representation! Adira and Grey deserve every happiness, and I can't wait to see Adira put their engineering genius and Trill knowledge to use in season 4.)
I love the "let's travel 930 years into the future" plot, where the Federation is no longer ubiquitous and reliable, and the futuretech is so shiny.
I love Book and Grudge, and genuinely ship Book/Michael, who deserves a lover as fun and competent as Book, and who I enjoy a lot more since she got loosened up by a year off from Starfleet, lost the buttoned-up military Vulcan repression, and started doing Feelings and Autonomy in a big way.
I adore Tilly and wish to be her friend, and am 100% here for neurodiverse representation in Star Trek, particularly given she does get a decent amount of recognition for her skills (although not enough, see below).
I could watch Jett Reno all day.
Saru is my #OneTrueCaptain. He's a compassionate, kind and thoughtful statesman, diplomat and philosopher, one of the best leaders Starfleet has ever had to offer. His character growth has been a tremendous journey and I'm so here for Star Trek's first non-human captain.

Reasons why I'm not angry, just disappointed

Season 1 was full of annoying Klingon soap opera scenes, which were just stuffy and one-dimensional without any characters that grabbed me. It was also unrelenting with piling up unresolved trauma and characters accumulating PTSD without any therapeutic support (which is a problem for the whole series tbh); and also too full of Ash Tyler unremittingly irritating.
Season 2 was annoying because anchoring the series around Spock and Pike felt like a step back for it, Spock was such an arsehole, L'Rell deserved better than a baby mama plotline, Pike's "destiny" is ableist as fuck and also totally unconvincing in a future where we can heal people at the atomic level, and the magical Time Crystal Macguffin was just silly and unbelievable.
The writers missed a MASSIVE trick with not explicitly making Control the origin story for the Borg which gets loose and plagues the Federation for centuries, an enemy of their own making. ("Struggle is pointless", come on!)
Season Three simultaneously kept me enthralled and made me howl with frustration. So many missed opportunities! The writers are really good at coming up with tantalising ideas and possibilities, and so bad at delivering.
Tilly. I wanted to see her prove herself. Her one time in the captain's chair, after a few witty bants, the ship is immediately boarded. She leads the bridge crew to escape their captors... But bizarrely, genius Tilly needs Michael to give her an idea for how to save the day, and in the end it isn't Tilly that does it, but Michael. And the show couldn't even promote her to Lieutenant? Disappointing, Discovery, disappointing. She deserves better.
And Saru! He deserves to captain Discovery. End of story. He did not deserve to be written out of the spotlight with some unconvincing crap about how he's too emotional to lead (compared with Michael, who cries every episode?) and then him prioritising the one to one rehabilitation of a superpowered dilithium baby over the damn Federation. This is not the captain I got to know. Give me a season 4 where Saru stays captain, with Lieutenant Tilly as First Officer, while Michael and Book become some sort of Starfleet irregulars unburdened by the chain of command. Now THAT I would be here for.
Adira! Centuries of Trill knowledge and all they get is a bit of cello playing and a plot hinged on their invisible dead boyfriend? I am HUNGRY to access more of Tal's history. Enrich this sixteen year old, they're worth it. (Also how is Adira the only nonbinary person we meet in the far distant future, hasn't the gender binary been eradicated by now??)
The whole plotline with Osyraa negotiating an armistice with the Federation was SUCH a tease. If they'd gone through with it that would have been a genuinely interesting bit of storytelling. Osyraa could have been written as morally ambiguous, not a one-note despot but a hardbitten "the ends justify the means" leader in desperate times, who is making tough calls and convinced she's doing the right thing half the time. They nearly got there, but in the end she was just too shallow and too quickly fobbed off as an evil baddie not worth treating with. It was fair for Vance to want her to be tried for her war crimes - but imagine if season four was about the Federation brokering peace with the Emerald Chain, grappling with the colonialism and capitalism within their own culture, finding common ground between the organisations, holding regional leaders to account for their cruelty, helping communities heal, dealing with grey areas and nuance. That would have been good viewing. But no, she had to be a big old meanie head and shoot people and then get shot. And don't get me started on the stupidity of the Emerald Chain just dissolving because their figurehead got dead. The galaxy's largest trading organisation with leverage over more than 50 planets? That is not going to collapse just because the Wicked Witch is dead. There's going to be layers of bureaucracy and management structures and millions of people who are all perfectly capable of keeping it all going.
The whole of the S3 finale was just massively disappointing. We nearly had diplomacy and compromise and moral complexity, an ensemble piece where the crew all coordinate to resist Osyraa's shipjacking together, where Aurellio switches sides, where Tilly comes through and shines like the star she is, where the ship's apparently sentient computer (hi Zora) takes powerful action to defend herself. Instead we got, guess what? Gung ho solo hero action from Michael Fucking Burnham, getting shot and shooting people, with minor help from some cute droids, and getting made captain for it. A big pile of over simplified individualist cowboy bullshit. And don't get me started on the turbolifts apparently zipping around inside the Death Star (??) - just where in Discovery is that weirdass empty space meant to be, exactly?
The source of the burn was a big sideeye for me, too. I mean I get it, I understand the idea, and I get the theme of empathic connection yada yada. But really, a dilithium Piranesi baby whose 125 year lifespan is just conveniently left unexplained, whose screams (which are literally soundwaves) somehow travel so fast that warp cores hundreds or thousands of lightyears away from each othre exploded one millionth of a microsecond apart? Because something something subspace resonance? Please. I was hoping for a more impressive and less dappy explanation than that. At least make it about quantum entanglement or the mycelial network or something.
Georgiou's rehabilitation in season 3 pissed me off too. I mean yes, obviously I could watch Michelle Yeoh make wisecracks and kick ass all day, but let's not forget that Emperor Georgiou is a space Nazi who has literally committed genocide, regularly tortures people for fun, keeps slaves and eats people. Are we meant to just forget all that for most of season 3 when she's cracking cute jokes and being part of the crew? And then she's sent back to Terra to have a second chance to be a decent human being, which okay, it's hard to be nonviolent in a culture that demands you kill or be killed, but apparently she's still fine with torturing the person she loves? Never mind eh - the torture doesn't matter cos she loves Michael (a bit like Snape, all sins forgiven cos he loves our fair protagonist). The crew all agree too: not a bad word said about her at her wake. She's an evil asshole, surely one of those morally upstanding dorks must have noticed. I am unconvinced.
And the whole thing about Book being able to operate the spore drive! What? So can all the empaths on his planet do it then? Why not build a thousand spore drives and crew them with people from his planet? And even if he can somehow commune with the mycelia, that doesn't mean he can navigate the mycelial network - didn't Stamets have to study and memorise it or something to be able to find his way around? Too magical, too neat, and just totally unbelievable.

In conclusion: amazing characters and world-building, with so much promise for inspiring storytelling, but lacklustre delivery. Too many plot holes, too many bad decisions, and too much emphasis on oversimplified morality, individual pew-pew heroism, and frankly too many life or death crises and traumas. Give me a season of Discovery where they aren't constantly fighting for their lives, they can get a break, get counselling, attend a concert, and have some episodes about culture and philosophy where we get cute domestic scenes with the characters and no-one cries.

Yeah, basically I want TNG only with a cast of women, queers and people of colour. I'll keep hoping.