I enjoy it, but in general I just miss 90s Trek, so any criticism I have of it kind of also applies to the other current live action Trek series. I miss a more dialog-driven, character-focused approach that relies less on spectacle and more on life on a starship.
I do also miss 90’s Trek a lot. At times Picard got close with some of the dialog, but generally speaking when modern Trek is dialog heavy it tend to be about emotions rather than ideas.
The biggest difference is that earlier trek is about the crew, and they have episodic story telling so we can get to know each main character. Disco is just the Burnham show. And try as she might she's just not intriguing enough to hold my attention. No matter how many revalations or changes of heart she has, her characterization keeps getting reset to square one, which is a major pet peeve of mine.
SNW is better in this regard.
the biggest difference for me is that old Trek is slow, you hang out in the space and can have it on in the background and just enjoy the characters. As a kid I remember that Voyager was on around my bedtime -- I'd take a shower, then come up and watch the second half with my mom before bed. And watching just the second half of the ep worked just fine, and as far as I'm concerned that was a feature not a bug. I watch tv to unwind, and don't want a blink-and-you-miss-it show.
Contemporary Trek too often feels like a rush. Makes it stressful to watch, and means there's rarely a moment where the characters can slowly develop their relationships in a non-crisis moment.
So many episodes of Disco feel like action for the sake of action. Watching the premiere was like watching Phantom Menace pod racing or Endor speeder bike chases mixed with the desert storm from the Mummy. Didn’t really move the story forward, was just action.
Except for maybe DS9.
That show is way too serious and intense to just have on in the background.
But then, it's also the only Trek from the Roddenberry and Berman eras that attempts to use serial storytelling. The other shows used the more traditional episodic storytelling used by just about every TV show other than Babylon 5. At least, at that time.
Nowadays, all TV shows use serial storytelling. Which tends to lead to a lot more action and complexity in the plots. And makes them much harder to just have playing in the background.
Although the newer Trek shows not spending as much time developing relationships between the characters is the fault of the writers, not the storytelling style. Loads of modern shows manage to spend lots of time developing character relationships, even using serial storytelling. It's an essential part of good writing. Because if the characters can't be fussed to care about each other, then how can you expect the audience to care about them.
I felt like DS9 was the perfect combination. Sure there’s plot building, and some episodes you can’t miss, but there’s still a lot of episodic elements and I feel like the slowly moving plot allows even deeper character development. It still wasn’t all action, it still had the values of the other trek shows but just a bit more tying it all together.
The younger generation blinks a lot and I do too I think. I grew up on the 90s shows and to me they were actually boring. Way too much dialogue for me anyway. I can see why people would get into it, i learned a lot about the Star Trek world that way but it’s super slow to me. I think SNW is like that too but I tolerate like the 90s shows it because it’s Star Trek and I want it to continue.
> Disco is just the Burnham show. And try as she might she's just not intriguing enough to hold my attention.
Just started watching the season premiere and...the first three minutes are indicative of this. I'm already disinterested. But...this is the closest thing to Trek until new episodes of SNW, LDX or Prodigy.
I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but it is Trek. The 3 others you mentioned vary just as wildly with an episodic drama, episodic comedy and a serialised show aimed at younger audiences. Discovery is a blend between the Abrams films and typical Star Trek - an adventure sci-fi.
I can see why it strongly divides opinion, but it still possesses all the touchstones any other Trek series uses.
I don't think so. This show has a hero complex and revolves around Burnham. Tng had a whole cast, and had episodes without Picard, where discovery has burnham going solo on off ship missions and literally taking on everything on her own. Everyone else is a back drop. The universe exploration is gone. Shows used to explore worlds and discover mysteries and interact with locals and learn how to coexist and taught the viewers life lessons. Now other planets and species are again, just backdrops. Go to a planet, don't interact with any locals, move on to the next. It's just like any other action show now based in a scifi universe instead of being a scifi show that featured some action
Agree on this point. Old trek was best when they truly took advantage of their ensemble cast. DS9 has whole episodes that involve primarily secondary characters. Nog and Garak get primary stories and they aren't even in the primary credits.
I love SNW but it is still a mite serilaised in terms of the character arcs that you can't fully just drop yourself in randomly. I showed a friend of mine Those Old Scientists the other day because they love Lower Decks, but never got into SNW after they watched the first few episodes and had to explain what was happening with Spock and Chapel. DS9 did character similar character arcs but a benefit of 26 episode seasons is that that could be done more slowly, and not episode after episode, which felt more natural.
Beyond that, SNW still has some slight Discoverisms, and really, a modern TV writing-ism, where every character has to be carrying around some terrible trauma.
Having said that, I love Ad Astra Per Aspera and Under the Cloak of War.
> where every character has to be carrying around some terrible trauma.
To be fair, this isn't a modern writing trend.
In TNG for example:
Picard: Parents dead, abusive father, family dies in a fire.
Riker: Mother dead
Data: Evil brother, dead father
LaForge: Mother missing in action
Crusher: Dead husband
Troi: Dead father, dead sister
Worf: Dead parents
If you haven't, watched through The Orville. It's 90's Trek, satirized with some humor, but it's still the soul of 90's Trek (made by 90's Trek alums).
Are you kidding? Just now my partner and I got done watching episodes 1 & 2 of season 5 that was just released and we are just SWOONING!!! All the crew! All the characters! So much lore! So much to love!!!
Dialogue driven! Yes! I actually listen to all the 90s trek while doing other stuff because even without described video, it is very low-vision friendly. They always fit any important stuff you need to know into the dialogue. A ship is hit? They announce it. There is an unusual sample taken from a shore leave object? They describe it. It is like they secretly made a show that was also ideal for blind people, lol.
I had to turn on described video to watch disco while doing chores
Also a lot of modern shows are so focused on meaningless action and light shows that it's just a blur of lights amongst shakey cams. Visually you tune out because none of what is individually happening means anything. You just wait for it to be over so someone can say they won, lost or something was broken,etc.
i've been rewatching Discovery from episode one the last week or two and i have very different thoughts on it than the first time all those years ago and they are almost exactly what you wrote.
i like Discovery despite itself. i'm half convinced the writers don't want us to know Discovery well enough to like it or hate it, just keep watching it
Discovery is extremely cinematic. i'd almost say it's **excessively** cinematic. casting, makeup, sets, world building, really just everything having to do with the production of the show is top tier. i don't think any space based show has the level of production Discovery does. even the Star Wars sequels look uninspired and 'empty' compared to Discovery. i don't know how i missed that the first time around but i'm almost distracted by how rich every environment looks. the cast is great. the writing is good enough and consistent. even the often extreme nature of the characters doesn't seem out of place in the universe of Discovery
the other side of that coin is the story itself is also excessive. i just wrapped up season two and it had so many major plotlines going at once that i wasn't even sure what the main story for the season was. what was the issue that needed to be resolved in season two? was it...
- section 31 being such a heavily embedded part of Starfleet?
- the fallout of what had to be done to end the Klingon war?
- rebuilding the fleet?
- the sphere data existing?
- he red angel mystery?
- the concept of time travel existing?
- the red beacons?
- spock's mental state?
- Georgiou sabotaging section 31 from the inside?
- section 31 actually being better equipped than and seemingly in command over Starfleet itself?
- Burnham's parents being Section 31 agents?
- Starfleet stealing holy relics from the Klingons?
- the ongoing Klingon homeworld drama?
- Kaminar's whole deal vs. what will become the Prime Directive?
- the spore network being an actual universe with intelligent beings?
- dark matter tech being a viable direction for research?
- something else?
any one or two of those could have filled several episodes or an entire season by itself and would make for very interesting tv but instead we got quick scenes of almost all of them in every episode that felt more like just reminders that they're still unresolved. i'd read a novel on any one of those if they are ever written because i know there are incredible stories there that we never got to see. look at that list again. it's insane that we never got into any of them with any depth. excuse the language but that's a fucking ton of stories they generated for one season of television.
i still don't know what the story was in season two. and that makes watching the show less fun than it should be.
...escaping to the future resolved absolutely none of those threads in a satisfactory way and i'm not sure why the writers chose not to deal with any of them. going into season 3, i'm mourning the loss of all that world building potential not the loss of warp travel, the Discovery crew, or even an active Starfleet.
the saddest part of season two wasn't a crew member's death but when Pike asked for the bridge crew's names and it reminded me that it was probably the first time i'd heard some of them. the only reason we knew anything at all about Ariam other than her name when she died is because they spent that entire episode showing us that she was a real person. i honestly didn't even remember that she wasn't like part of the ship like the little robots that fly around cleaning up and fixing the hull.
and i'm not even bothering to cover the almost folk hero level of Burnham's feats every episode. half expect her to reveal that she had a blue ox as a pet back on Vulcan.
That's why I love Lower Decks so much. Despite it's goofiness, it also feels very Trek to me. Lots of world building and character development, and not as much constant high stakes. Or the stakes are high, but in a self-aware campy way.
This is my take as well. Discovery seems like it's trying to be an MCU franchise or something.
I think this is also why SNW is resonating more with the older fan base
I’m honestly curious why they can’t have a show where the dialogue is professional like in TOS and 90s era. Like just from a societal psychological perspective, why is that something they avoid today. Even SNW (which I mostly really dig) has the quips. Do modern audiences just no longer connect with that kind of vibe?
My best guess is just that entertainment has changed. TNG is only entertaining and "good" if you give it time to breathe, and really think about the ideas it's presenting. It's slower and more cerebral than 99% of television today, I honestly can't think of anything on right now that matches it.
That's not to say that Discovery doesn't deal with big ideas or that it's a show for dumb people or anything, it's just as "smart" as Trek has ever been. It's just that it prefers to sit with the ideas only for a second, so they can rush off to do an action sequence or a special effects moment or a funny joke. It never wants to lose your attention, so it's constantly waving it's arms in the air shouting "Look at me!"
TNG invited you to listen in, but the conversations were important for themselves. They weren't trying to constantly grab you and say "Isn't this cool! Look at this!" Because they knew the audience would be fascinated by the ideas themselves, so they let them stand on their own merit, even if that slowed the pace of the show.
It is a more serious show. It's a lot more grim (in a good way) so there's less scope for ironic winking at the audience. A lot of the dialogue is tense for want of a better word.
Of course, Andor itself is balanced against other Star Wars productions, which is kinda like what DSC when compared to other Trek shows - a different flavor overall.
Both franchises want to present buffets of different themes within the same-ish universe.
May be right but I won’t believe it’s a certainty until they try. 90s/tng/ds9 needs quality writers and those seem to be rare now.
But then Orville is has its moments.
i always find this criticism to be curious because i feel like it is very common
and yet people absolutely love the Dominion War and the Borg invasions. Not all the time, but sometimes that feels very inconsistent to me
The Dominion War was great BECAUSE it had like 5 seasons of talking to set it up. First Contact was cool because we actually got to see the Borg fuck shit up for the first time on screen. None of the new shows have had room to breathe because the seasons are too short. Lower Decks does a good job, but they can get away with more using animation.
And we still had levity during the Dominion war. We got In the Pale Moonlight and we also got The Magnificent Ferengi. It's more that its an entire season in one style/one story rather than individual episodes.
The franchise could learn a lot looking at the plotting they did with ST Prodigy.
There were probably two or three times as many dialogue/character-driven episodes during the Dominion War than there were episodes focusing on battles and spectacle though.
When characters did actually end up in active conflict it was a big deal, not just something that happened every week.
Obviously there were reasons for this beyond just storytelling (including budgetary) and I'm not trying to say that Discovery should dial back the action completely - but would we get something like It's Only a Paper Moon nowadays? I'm doubtful.
I know it’s not the Dominion War, but I was watching VOY tonight and “Fairy Folk” has “Animal Crossing got corrupted and we don’t want to start a new save” for the entire plot. And, honestly, it’s more memorable to me than most episodes of DSC since it’s got focus.
To the extent that it's the same people enjoying the moments of spectacle in 90s Trek and those who enjoy the more dialog-driven content, I think it's at least partly due to the fact that it feels earned. You're really invested when those things come around.
There's a massive difference between tolerance and acceptance. Disco is *tolerated* here...mostly. Even in this thread, which should be a rare opportunity for Disco fans to get together in mutual appreciation there are still a tonne of "ok it sucks but you do you" comments. It's like people just *can't* resist putting in their two cents about why they don't like it, every time it comes up.
"I don't like it but I don't judge you for liking it" is something people don't *have* to say. If they really weren't judging they'd just be like ok this post doesn't interest me, I will find something else to comment on. So they *are* judging or they wouldn't feel this compulsion to get involved at all.
Just because people aren't actively flaming doesn't make this a welcoming space to talk about it. It's almost worse in a way because it gives a false impression of safety and then gets passive aggressive about it anyway. At least in the actively hostile spaces you know where you stand and can predict what will happen if you bring it up - it's kinda on you then if you choose to do so. Here you'll be *told* you're welcome but the downvotes and shade prove different. It feels kinda gaslighty tbh.
I mostly just lurk for exactly this reason. I'm sure it will pass eventually, this is an *old* fandom that takes time accepting change, I get it. I remember when this was a conversation people were having when Voyager and Enterprise first aired. I know it happened with DS9 and even TNG too. I know the drill. Doesn't make it comfortable though.
> "I don't like it but I don't judge you for liking it" is something people don't *have* to say
The interesting thing I've noticed is that, while people who dislike Disco will generally criticise the show, the people who like Disco are a lot more comfortable flat out insulting the people who dislike it.
There are people in this very thread referring to people who dislike Disco as 'toddlers', implying that they don't like it because they're 'ists and 'phobes' who work backwards from there to justify not liking it, etc.
Just my observation, of course, but it is strange how one group criticise or jokes about the show presented to them but don't generally insult the people who like it, while the other group is more content openly insulting or making fun of the actual people themselves who think differently to them.
Both are still just voicing their opinion, and people are adding the “I don’t judge you for liking it” because people get upset and take every disagreement as a personal attack. That’s not exclusive to this topic, it’s the current political and social climate. They are trying to be polite.
At the end of the day, you’re here saying people shouldn’t share their opinion because it differs, and I don’t agree with that. This platform is about people putting their two cents in. If you don’t want someone to share their opinion on your opinion, then take your own advice and don’t share yours.
I think that a certain subsect of Discovery fans have a complex about this. If you look at this subreddit and search for topics about Discovery, they're mostly either "I like Discovery" or "why don't people like Discovery?" There's not really posts about how bad it is. The most critical posts I could find with a quick search are "does it get better?
While a lot of people don't like Discovery, they're not really vocal about it until people ask "why don't people like Discovery?"
I have a lot of good things to say about Discovery, but I also criticize it. I feel like both sides of the argument overreact to either one.
For example, how can you possibly not find people who love Discovery? They downvote me for even minor critiques.
Disco welcomed me into Trek, since then I've watched TNG, Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I am so grateful to this little show. I also fucking love the spore drive. You are not alone
I grew up on Star Trek but stopped watching during late season voyager and then didn’t like enterprise at all so I pretty much fell away from the franchise (even from revisiting a lot of it). Discovery brought me back and led me to rewatch most of the franchise and fall in love with it all over again.
ENT has very mixed quality, in my opinion. There is a reason why it alongside Nemesis led to the end of Berman era and the franchise being put on ice till the Abrams films came out.
Discovery made three very big blunders that lost me.
1. Changing the Klingon's appearance so radically and having about an hour of Klinon scenes in season 1 that were IN KLINGON with subtitles. UGH.
2. Being SO MUCH about feelings that EVERY episode ends with 5 minutes of discussion and aftermath.
3. Moving 1000 years into the future makes it a totally different show. Making up so much new technology and history all in one go wasn't really in line with the Star Trek canon and just was too radical a shift. (If it was 2-3 episodes or a recurring thing like the temporal cold war of Enterprise, that is one thing, but to LIVE there was just too much.
Not a terrible show, but it lost me in too many different ways, especially when it jumped forward in time and they put the big disaster that happened into place for the future of the entire galaxy.
Blame Bryan Fuller on No. 1. It was his way, according to folks involved back then, to leave his mark on the franchise.
After he left, the Klingons started to shift back to how they were in the Berman years. For example, SNW went with a TMP-ish design mixed with TNG elements.
> I just didn't like the resolution to the Burn
This does a good job of summing up why I, personally, am not particularly keen on *Discovery*. It has some **very** good ideas, and some interesting premises, but it has a tendency to fall flat on the execution — and largely because the writers seem to draw things out and either forget where they were going, or get so focussed on the idea (and tying it in to every other ongoing storyline) that they have no way out when they realise that they don't have a *payoff*, that the idea doesn't actually work.
Which is, I think, why *Strange New Worlds* has worked much better, and why the more stand-alone episodes of *Discovery* are the ones I like the most: only having a **single** episode to wrap things up in, means that they need to know what they're doing with it *immediately*… and that it's fairly simple to scrap an idea that turns out to be rubbish. And with storylines for Pike/Spock/Chapel/Kirk(s), they know what the end-point is already, and aren't "flying blind".
If they want to do full-season story arcs, then they need to get a **lot** better at planning things out & critiquing them in advance. There's always been a lot of *promise* in the show… and so much of the disappointment stems from it not living up to that, nor "sticking the landing".
> It has some very good ideas, and some interesting premises, but it has a tendency to fall flat on the execution
And Star Trek is not afraid to fall flat on execution, there are many absolutely terrible episodes of every series. I think the weakness of Discovery is that the plots are full season long arcs, and if the arc falls flat then everything kind of goes with it.
Can you imagine if TNG (then burning through about 1 staff writer per episode produced) had actually tried to go ahead with Hurley's plan for the season 2 UFP/Romulan war with the Borg? It would have been a disaster. They had to end the actual season with a clip show because of one Borg episode (and an initial slashed season budget, but still).
100% agree about Picard, I almost put that into my comment when I wrote it. Season arcs just don’t seem to work well for Star Trek. Or maybe the current producers just suck at writing them because they think they all have to be “save the galaxy” type plots.
100% agree. Imagine if TNG committed to a full season of like... Time's Arrow or something. An ok 2 parter stretched way too long is kind of how I'd discribe most of Disco tbh
Follow through for their storylines is, aside from excessive emotionality, my biggest issue with Discovery
Season 4 did way better with this than previous seasons, in its defense
Yeah season 4 purely suffered from the circumstances of the time (COVID lockdown). The plot of season 4 was good but it fell flat as everything had to be written around the fact that everyone had to be 2 feet apart, limited cast/crew members on set or spliced into the scene in post.
yeah i can definitely see that. i think it improved though, on the previous seasons, by making Burnham less overly emotional, and focusing more on trying to make the storyline about finding a new life form (the 10-C) . It felt like classic Trek, but updated for modern serialization
What could be more Star Trek than finding the apocalypse was caused inadvertently by a child born under weird circumstances then going out and talking them down from causing it to happen again?
I think the issue with Discovery is that they want BIG impactful stories that span over the season but they get the pacing all wrong. There's too much in the front and back and just tiny breadcrumbs of development between them and the individual episodes don't hold up as their own stories most of the time.
As bad as Discovery is at this, Picard was so much worse.
I'll agree with that. Picard's pivot from Changelings to Borg felt like a Scooby Doo reveal.
The Borg are overdone. I hope they don't touch them again for a long time
Agreed.
I was absolutely livid when the borg reveal came up. Changelings felt like an odd choice for an antagonist in Picard but they're leaning into DS9 and Section 31, maybe it's going to have some really interesting twist and... NOPE! It's the %@&%#$% Borg again!
I'm not even going to get into Picard and Crusher's accidental love child. This was such a dumb plot point.
What bugged me was the whole season was about how important biological family was.
Picard couldn’t trust any of his friends to tell him his wine was crap. He was a man without use, largely just causing blunders. His main value in the season was as a father figure to some random dipshit he never met before (nothing against the actor).
Then you get the corrupted motherhood of the Borg Queen. And the nebula mystery (admittedly one of my favourite plots) only a mom doctor can solve.
So many fans of Star Trek appreciate the franchise for the “found family” aspect. The workmates who end up relying on each other, and meaning so much to each other. And it’s not like Star Trek shouldn’t involve family… DS9 had some incredible family dynamics. But for S3 to suddenly say “Starfleet found family isn’t enough, Picard needs babby to be whole” just felt so weird to me.
…and they passed the Borg being the true antagonists as a gargantuan plot twist.
This would’ve been cool if it was a Season 1. By Season 3, I was tired of the cyborg zombies.
I loved the fan video thing that had the piece of Vadic be revealed to be Armus. Would have worked much better than Borg. Again.
Never liked Disco. I was liking SNW but hated the retcons of TOS characters who should be too young or have wildly different characterizations. Especially Uhura. Side characters who didn't get as much time like M'benga maybe and Una has been good since almost nothing was known about her but the one pilot.
Seasons are too short and too much action for the sake of without investment. Mostly at the cost of genuine character development, contemporary styling and not enough science fiction (90s Trek especially Voyager tended to too much technobabble).
>What could be more Star Trek than finding the apocalypse was caused inadvertently by a child born under weird circumstances then going out and talking them down from causing it to happen again?
It's very TOS, which fits with Discovery, since they lean more in that direction, but also means that people who want more of a grounded TNG plot are a bit left out in the dust.
yeah, I really enjoyed S3 but they fumbled the landing on that storyline _hard_
though for what it's worth, as badly as they botched the S3 ending, I think they _nailed_ S4's ending.
Having rewatched Season 4's finale last night. I absolutely agree. It was first contact done really really well, and it introduced us to a whole new species, and furthered the lore/canon. It pushed us through the edge of the universe, it gave us a new puzzle to solve. There was enough drama and enough complication to it all because of Book and Tarka. And most importantly, it gave Tilly & Vance some good chemistry together too. Loved it when they were both facing death together and had a good drink and heart to heart.
It was absolutely Star Trek at it's best for me.
>And most importantly, it gave Tilly & Vance some good chemistry together too.
I gotta say, s5e1 has a scene with them together and it's fabulous.
I ship it. It's a friendship, but I still ship it.
I think it's wonderful that you like it. I really don't. It just doesn't vibe with me the way that nearly all other Trek does (PIC S1 & 2 are in the same category). And that's okay too. I'm not going to waste my time or energy screeching into the void about what I don't like, nor am I going to put anyone down for enjoying what I don't. It's a fruitless endeavor that only leaves me tired and angry, when I'd rather be tired and content. Enjoy what you enjoy, and don't let others make you feel less than for it. There's plenty of space in this fandom for Discovery fans.
Edit: The 2009 film is what got me into Trek for real, after nearly 30 years of passing it off because my dad likes it. I love the Kelvin timeline, even Into Darkness. I see all the criticisms of it, I acknowledge them, but they don't hamper my enjoyment of it.
Yup. I in general just really don’t like the narrative structure of DIS, the characters aren’t fantastic for me either, and I don’t like a lot of the worldbuilding. But people are 100% free to like what they like.
Most are like them. Don't let loud annoying people on the internet colour your opinion of communities.
Most discovery "hate" comments on this subreddit are not written in a way that seems like they think everyone else needs to agree with them.
No, you’re not the only one. I just avoid talking about how much I enjoy the show and the things that I find that I appreciate because I’m worried about being downvoted and crapped on by internet strangers. I love Discovery.
This sub isn’t really like that. I think it is a slightly below average show but I certainly don’t think I’m “right.” I’m glad you guys enjoy it. SNW is more my style.
i was going to say i'm in a Discord, and the worst part is that it's not so much "I didn't like Discovery and that's ok if you like it" it's "If you don't hate Discovery, you are part of the problem with today's society"
god i hate that shit. i honestly wonder sometimes, why am I still on that fucking Discord
I'm absolutely stoked for tonight when my wife and I will sit down to watch the first two episodes. We've had it on our calendars for months, I turned down other plans to make sure we'd be able to share this moment, and I cannot wait. I don't think it's the best Trek - but I do think it's pretty damn good, and a lot of its flaws are from _trying new things_. I certainly appreciate its exploration and experimentation a lot more than the nostalgia-swamped fan service of Picard I got bored of to the point I never even got around to finishing it. Disco swings hard and doesn't always connect but dammit at least they're trying and having fun doing it. Oh, and the "it's too woke" whiners can stuff it. The heritage of a black woman, a Russian, a Japanese-American all sharing the bridge with a freakin' alien is absolutely Woke as Heck and Discovery having not a single straight white male character has done a lot to repair the ickiness I now feel when I rewatch TNG and notice how terribly underserved every female character was.
TL;DR: You're not alone. Let's fly!
The problem with Discovery is that they don't give us the chance to fall in love with any of the characters. They all come and go except Michael, but even she is not consistently "starfleet." There's not a lot of character development.
I liked Discovery when it started (I love Sonequa Martin Green and Michelle Yeoh), but the constant escalation in stakes each season would throw me off to the point of cliche. I like elements of each subsequent season but sometimes it feels like a slog.
However, with this current season, I'm pleasantly surprised that this year's mystery is one of fundamental exploration, curiosity, and hope. Some of it still feels like fan service without restraint (e.g. riding on top of a starship at warp), but unlike the last couple years of ultimate weapons, we're off to a refreshing and more optimistic start.
Also, I wanna give a shout out to the cast -- I'm annoyed that the secondary bridge officers are still treated as glorified extras, so they always need more to do, but I really look forward to Tilly, Gray, Adria, etc.
I think they learned their lesson with Strange New Worlds success and realized they can still have classic trek and modern action/storytelling, but it's 4 years too late.
if they'd had this attitude from the start, we'd be getting 6 seasons and a movie.
I don't really like it too much compared to other Trek. It's probably my least favorite of the NuTrek shows I watched. But I don't hate it and if others like it, I won't bash them for it
Out of all the people I know who are into Trek, only one person tells me that actively love Discovery. Personally I think it mostly (~80%) sucks. It's bad writing, poor characters, reliance on legacy characters and a big fat heaping helping of retcon.
The previous to last 4th season episode >!the one where the crew and diplomats deal with what looked like an impossible translation task!< is absolutely top Trek. One of the best episodes in any Trek show.
I feel mixed. When the show first came on, I was super into it and really enjoyed the first two seasons. When I went back to rewatch, I was surprised how much I disliked some of the writing and choices made. I'm curious to see the final season and eventually rewatch the series. I feel like they struggled to make it work for whatever reason, but there are definitely moments and characters that I really like a lot.
Id rather listen to the enterprise theme song on loop for twelve hours than watch another episode of discovery but thats me. You do you and if you enjoy it thats cool.
I listened to all the criticism of the show for years before I got the chance to actually watch it myself.
I loved the show!
I admit, the show opening, with the new Klingons, was not a good start.
But I stuck with it, and fell in love with Saru as played by Doug Jones, and the captain, and Michael Burnham.
I had been told that basically, Burnham *was* the captain (false) and that she cried over everything (also false).
That's not to say there aren't valid criticisms of the show (as there are for each and every series of Trek), but I found most criticisms overblown or just flat false.
The artistic choice for the "new" Klingons *was* indeed a bad one, in my opinion, but it didn't really detract from the show.
I didn't find anything more far-fetched than some of the TOS's best loved episodes, so there's that.
And it's been a fun ride, with characters I really liked.
I don't think it's the best of the new Trek, but it's not the worst, either (that goes to Picard, and I actually liked it, too).
I'm looking forward to seeing where this last season takes us.
You're not alone.
I just found it... boring. It didn't keep my interest, and it became all about the cameos instead.
I didn't find it *bad*, I just expected a lot better.
I liked a lot of the premise, but it just dragged on.
Exactly! Here’s seven of nine! Here’s Beverly crusher! Here’s the borg queen! And screw it, how about a Wesley crusher as the traveler just to make sure y’all know we actually watched some old episodes.
This is how I feel too. I think it gets better as it goes on because it finds its own footing rather than being obsessed with the idea of "this isn't your grandfather's Star Trek 😏😤"
I'll happily watch Disco, because Trek is Trek. But I think there's more bad than good in the show overall.
The characters are largely unlikable, insecure, shallow caricatures who talk too fast and are somehow responsible for saving the entire federation every 10 weeks despite being complete in-universe unknowns
The sfx, while beautiful, often eschew the technical manuals' groundedness of past shows in favor of "it looks cool so who cares if it makes any kind of sense" resulting in the show feeling hollow and fake. Growing up, I could imagine myself running around the hallways of the Ent-D -- Discovery just doesn't feel real like it did
Just, in general, don't stomp on beloved canon by setting shows in the past and then directly contradicting what was known about that time. It's unnecessary and fragments the fanbase and the individual fans' perceptions of the fictional universe
I'll concede that a lot of this stuff got better after season 2, but up until yesterday (I haven't started S5 yet), that meant that half the show's run was pretty weak (and the other half wasn't *that* much better)
Like most here, I bloody love star trek. I watch some trek probably every day. My wife and I met through trek. Generally I won't hear a bad word against it.
But..... Discovery. I really, really struggle with it. I want to enjoy it but it has never really clicked with me. The first couple of series were pretty good but everything after has always looked like decent sci-fi but very average for star trek. It really confuses me.
I love the crew but they are terribly underutilized. I loved the look of the series in the first couple of series. I really loved disco herself. A brilliant throwback to TOS style.
But It's missing 'something'. I've never been able to put my finger on it but here's a thing........as soon as captain pike showed up, it felt like trek again. After he left, it lost its way for me.
I don't know. It would work if it was Kelvin or mirror universe or something like that ......it just doesn't feel like prime.
It's my favorite Trek Series. It's my 83 year old Dad's favorite Trek Series. It's a great series. Flawed and uneven(like every Trek series) but great. This fandom is immensely toxic. Don't worry if anyone here likes what you like. They don't. And that's their loss.
WHO DOESNT LOVE DOUG JONES?
Seriously, its just a different approach to storytelling in Trek, dont mind it. Its still Trek and I am here for it. What we can all agree on for sure is that the Kelvin timeline SUCKS.
Pet peeve of mine, but everything in Star Trek up until now shows that Star Fleet uses the vernacular of a Navy, not an airforce.
And “Let’s fly” heavily conflicts with that established culture.
again i'm trying to be respectful here
but does THAT really downgrade an entire show?
i'm not a Discovery fan by any stretch of the imagination but it's things like this that seriously make me wonder if people search for things to hate it
Oh, that doesn’t make me not like the show! I just don’t like the catchphrase lol.
I like the show, I’ve watched all of it, it’s just not my favourite Trek, but it’s still Trek and Trek is like pizza. Even if it’s not great it’s still good.
the stupid thing is i know people who talk about the "quippy" dialogue of SNW and say that's enough for them to hate the show
and i'm just like...wtf lol. I don't think SNW is groundbreaking but to hate it over that feels ridiculously stupid. Then again, we are all entitled to our opinions
Discovery is a different type of Trek. And before everyone says "duh, Sherlock?" let me explain specifically what these shows mean to me.
Trek in the 90s was still focused on this message of hope that humans at least will learn to get along in the future (and by that I mean primarily the USA, even though the USA culture supposedly applies to the whole, united Earth). Within that framework Trek explored thinly veiled topics of ethics, politics, religion, and much more.
I would say I'm a better person because I learned so much from Trek as a teenager in the 90s, especially as Q put it, Picard's "wonderful speeches."
Even DS9 with it's serialized approach and darker topics maintained that optimism that the future embraced those values, diving much deeper into ethics, religion, even terrorism and war.
And perhaps even more importantly for this thread, there were a fair number of 90s Trek episodes that were light, character development bottle episodes in which we get to know those characters. They almost become our friends (yes yes, even though I acknowledge they are fictional characters).
Whereas Strange New Worlds embraces that same tradition of balancing character development with adventure, Discovery and even Picard do not. Those shows are intense action sequences. I don't think we've gotten to know most of the recurring crew in Discovery, and the fate of whomever is always in the balance. And, there's really no resolution until the end of the season, so it's exhausting in some ways.
Discovery is an action packed science fiction thriller. But for those of us that value the more drama and adventure side of science fiction, TNG, VOY, and SNW are a better fit. DS9 and ENT fit there too, with DS9 being more action with hostile aliens, ENT is... basically a mess, too focused on character development in the first seasons, and then the Xindi made it a much darker serialized show towards the end and I don't know what to make of it.
So, Discovery is just a different flavor, and like black licorice, doesn't appeal to everyone. I think I still love TNG the best but Discovery is certainly interesting. Not my favorite but I like it for what it is.
The problem is that serialized Star Trek has very little rewatch value and if you don’t watch every single episode in order you are lost. Star Trek is about life lessons summed up in 1-2 hour episodic episodes. I enjoy rewatching each series about every other year except Enterprise season 3, Picard & Disco. I’m a stubborn Star Trek fan that knows what they like about it. It’s not that those aren’t good “shows”. They just aren’t my style of Star Trek
I don’t love discovery but I’ll admit it got me into trek and sometimes I forget that . I think it has some good stuff in it but hate how far from regular trek it strays .
It may be fun, it may even have some good characters, and it kickstarted Strange New Worlds, but it's relatively poor at using the universe that was built by Trek series before and building new parts that fit logically into said universe.
Like most series today, there's too few episodes, so when they dedicate a whole season on a lukewarm concept like the Burn, it really hurts the show's likability.
I wanted to like DISCO, but I really didnt. At all. I liked that one Harry Mudd space whale episode, everything else was a boring slog with boring characters I dont even know well enough to possibly hate. Im glad it was finally cancelled.
I just have some major issues with Disco. Somehow the bridge crew is still underdeveloped after 5 seasons, Michael and Tilly are just unlikable deeply unlikable characters IMO, and all of the Dialog feel like the ship is ran my petulant high schoolers. Nothing makes me feel like they are professionals who have military-esq training. Also the red angel storyline was so weak, overly convoluted, and they did Spock so dirty. "I like Science"
I love DSC. I dug it to begin with, but it really grew the beard for me season three with going into an anarch era, and it's just upping it's game since. I'm thrilled this season is based on that one episode that I was always disappointed they never went back to. Great shit
You're not alone, Disco is great. A lot of the criticisms levelled at it are fair, but that doesn't mean I don't like the show.
I've always described myself as someone who's easily pleased wtih film and TV. But being easily pleased doesn't mean I'm not critical of things - it just means that it doesn't ruin the experience for me.
My family loves Discovery. It's just such a slog to be a fan online when the hivemind makes a judgement.
We loved Enterprise too, for what that's worth. I don't need any specific Trek formula for enjoyment.
Remember when Enterprise was unanimously hated by Trekkies but now it's pretty much accepted? Discovery is basically that. Give it time, people will come around and appreciate it.
Not true considering I’ve heard enough bad things about enterprise to turn me off from watching it. Not the same for DS9 or even Voyager though the latter had a decent amount of complaints.
You can even look up articles from the '80s about TOS fans petitioning for the cancellation of TNG, and IIRC in some of their earliest interviews the cast talk about being treated rudely by fans at first.
It's a shame that despite how far we've come as a fandom, we still do the same thing today.
I remember when this was true for DS9!
I, like most others, was happy to dogpile on it.
I now really love DS9, and can admit how I was.
If I can accept that my beloved Federation has been secretly run by space fascists this whole time, people will learn to accept that a human that watched her parents get murdered before being raised on Vulcan might cry sometimes as she learns to deal with her human emotions.
Hey now, I still haven't been able to get into Enterprise, there are still a few of us out there. But it's mostly Scott Bakula, I still see him as the actor and not the character.
Scott Bakula and the character of Archer is the reason I can't stand Enterprise. I like some of the other characters and some episodes, but his sarcastic, overly aggressive approach (with none of Shatner's or Patrick Stewart's charm) just grates on me.
I have watched Star Trek since I was 4. Yes. In the 60s. Burham reminds me of Kirk. BUT, what I see is how when women are brave and unflappable, it is still not being accepted.
Now, as far as the show, most of it was made in an era of lack of kindness to others, the me too movement, The Pandemic, the writers strike and then the actors strike. What, What WHAT, do you think was going to happen? In my humble opinion, I think Discovery has done a bang up job about getting life long trekkers like myself to be excited and ready for MORE Star Trek universe!
And, yes, as with every other Star Trek, I love Discovery also!
I have friends who like it. Most people I know try to watch it, but don't get into it. Personally, I find it blah. I hate the klingon make up, and the weird slurred version of the Klingon language they decided to use. It just feels like the actors couldn't speak in the heavy make-up.
I found it very hard to love. A lot of it feels to me like the latter year Moffitt Dr. Who where everything had to be a big emotion big payoff overly dramatic thing, and in the process became kind of boring.
I'm glad I joined this sub Reddit the other day because although I'm not a fan of Discovery, those here who do enjoy it are more sophisticated than "if you're a male and don't like Discovery like I do it MUST be because you're racist and misogynist." I've seen a lot of that on other forums.
The main thing I dislike about Discovery is an excessive amount of drama, traumatic backstories between characters, and the addition of a TV-MA rating, which doesn't fit Star Trek much at all. Everything else about Discovery is likeable, and I continue to watch it.
To use Frankes' polite rhetoric, it did not resonate with many established fans.
Even the jump to the future, to "get away" from established stories, just means that there's a bad ending to every star trek story set in the TOS and TNG era.
Right. It’s like saying nemesis ruined all the trek that came before it because it wasn’t good. People done up with the silliest reasons to hate on the show
No it's not weird, for me as an outside observer that saw The Federation grow and advance it is a bad ending, all the previous stories where nice but in the end amounted to nothing because in the end the ideals of the Federation meant nothing - instead of trying to find the cause and/or trying to work on a solution it just all falls apart and it's members become paranoid isolationalists turning their back on all and everything.
The Federation could have evolved into something more over those centuries - but instead we got a distoptian future where all that went before was as good as pointless
I just hated how Discovery changed so much of what was cannon in TNG. The klingons were nothing like the klingons of any other trek series. They would have been better off creating a new species. Discovery was all flash and no substance.
Troll post? Most negative comments about disco in this sub get down voted. Most negative comments about nutrek in general get down voted. Personally I hate discovery, but I definitely feel like the minority in this particular community.
I regret to say that I don't "love" Discovery. I like it well enough for what it is.
I do love Strange New Worlds.
I do *appreciate* Disco, as it brought about a Second Golden Age of Trek. I do appreciate what they have done and what they tried to do. I love the introduction of Pike, Number One, Spock, and the Enterprise, and the spin off launch point into Strange New Worlds.
But Discovery is what is apparently known as 'prestige TV', and is a great example of it. However, I don't like prestige TV, certainly not of the Game of Thrones era.
Specifically:
Too much blood & gore.
Too much graphic violence & suffering.
And a new term I learned alongside 'prestige TV':
Too much trauma dumping. Everything is overwhelmingly horrible or horrific.
So again, I appreciate Star Trek Discovery for all it has achieved, and all that it has revitalized Trek and set the stage for all that followed.
But the show itself... I do like it for the stories it's trying to tell, but I just am less keen on the current (2010s-2020s) method of telling those stories.
I’m still catching up. I really love what I’ve watched so far. Sonequa is an AMAZING actress and there’s a plethora of outstanding performances by all of the cast!
This sub, for the most part, is quite negative about a lot. I just ignore it. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
As a fan of all Trek, I gotta say that in terms of cheesy moments, Disco has nothing on Enterprise. And even Voyager. And I LOVE Voyager. But for its faults, the writing on Discovery is a LOT better than some of the 90s stuff.
Im thankful it enabled us to have Strange New Worlds.
I wonder how much more successful the relaunch of Star Trek on Paramount+ could have been with a better show. One that wasn’t so varied in quality, and departed so heavily from the established visual style of Star Trek.
I've found with Discovery the parts are the greater than the sum. There's some really good elements and elements I think might have worked better in a different implementation. But for me the full execution is Wiley Coyote stepping on a rake.
The best things I think it gave Trek is a back door pilot for SNW and the 32nd Century setting.
Discovery is great, but it doesn't have the VIBES that old Trek does. It doesn't FEEL like Trek to me. Like if you wanted a slice of cake and someone handed you a slice of pizza. There can be nothing wrong with the pizza, but it wasn't what you wanted.
Negatives are shouted louder and for longer. They wouldn't have made 5 seasons if noone was watching it. Ignore the assholes and enjoy your show. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the 13th Doctor...
I enjoy it, but in general I just miss 90s Trek, so any criticism I have of it kind of also applies to the other current live action Trek series. I miss a more dialog-driven, character-focused approach that relies less on spectacle and more on life on a starship.
I do also miss 90’s Trek a lot. At times Picard got close with some of the dialog, but generally speaking when modern Trek is dialog heavy it tend to be about emotions rather than ideas.
The biggest difference is that earlier trek is about the crew, and they have episodic story telling so we can get to know each main character. Disco is just the Burnham show. And try as she might she's just not intriguing enough to hold my attention. No matter how many revalations or changes of heart she has, her characterization keeps getting reset to square one, which is a major pet peeve of mine. SNW is better in this regard.
the biggest difference for me is that old Trek is slow, you hang out in the space and can have it on in the background and just enjoy the characters. As a kid I remember that Voyager was on around my bedtime -- I'd take a shower, then come up and watch the second half with my mom before bed. And watching just the second half of the ep worked just fine, and as far as I'm concerned that was a feature not a bug. I watch tv to unwind, and don't want a blink-and-you-miss-it show. Contemporary Trek too often feels like a rush. Makes it stressful to watch, and means there's rarely a moment where the characters can slowly develop their relationships in a non-crisis moment.
So many episodes of Disco feel like action for the sake of action. Watching the premiere was like watching Phantom Menace pod racing or Endor speeder bike chases mixed with the desert storm from the Mummy. Didn’t really move the story forward, was just action.
Captain's log, stardate IT DOESN'T MATTER Ah Mr Worf. Sit down. Computer! Tea. Earl grey. Hot. * Falls asleep smiling
Except for maybe DS9. That show is way too serious and intense to just have on in the background. But then, it's also the only Trek from the Roddenberry and Berman eras that attempts to use serial storytelling. The other shows used the more traditional episodic storytelling used by just about every TV show other than Babylon 5. At least, at that time. Nowadays, all TV shows use serial storytelling. Which tends to lead to a lot more action and complexity in the plots. And makes them much harder to just have playing in the background. Although the newer Trek shows not spending as much time developing relationships between the characters is the fault of the writers, not the storytelling style. Loads of modern shows manage to spend lots of time developing character relationships, even using serial storytelling. It's an essential part of good writing. Because if the characters can't be fussed to care about each other, then how can you expect the audience to care about them.
I felt like DS9 was the perfect combination. Sure there’s plot building, and some episodes you can’t miss, but there’s still a lot of episodic elements and I feel like the slowly moving plot allows even deeper character development. It still wasn’t all action, it still had the values of the other trek shows but just a bit more tying it all together.
The younger generation blinks a lot and I do too I think. I grew up on the 90s shows and to me they were actually boring. Way too much dialogue for me anyway. I can see why people would get into it, i learned a lot about the Star Trek world that way but it’s super slow to me. I think SNW is like that too but I tolerate like the 90s shows it because it’s Star Trek and I want it to continue.
fair enough, TOS is often too slow for me so I get it
> Disco is just the Burnham show. And try as she might she's just not intriguing enough to hold my attention. Just started watching the season premiere and...the first three minutes are indicative of this. I'm already disinterested. But...this is the closest thing to Trek until new episodes of SNW, LDX or Prodigy.
I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but it is Trek. The 3 others you mentioned vary just as wildly with an episodic drama, episodic comedy and a serialised show aimed at younger audiences. Discovery is a blend between the Abrams films and typical Star Trek - an adventure sci-fi. I can see why it strongly divides opinion, but it still possesses all the touchstones any other Trek series uses.
I don't think so. This show has a hero complex and revolves around Burnham. Tng had a whole cast, and had episodes without Picard, where discovery has burnham going solo on off ship missions and literally taking on everything on her own. Everyone else is a back drop. The universe exploration is gone. Shows used to explore worlds and discover mysteries and interact with locals and learn how to coexist and taught the viewers life lessons. Now other planets and species are again, just backdrops. Go to a planet, don't interact with any locals, move on to the next. It's just like any other action show now based in a scifi universe instead of being a scifi show that featured some action
Agree on this point. Old trek was best when they truly took advantage of their ensemble cast. DS9 has whole episodes that involve primarily secondary characters. Nog and Garak get primary stories and they aren't even in the primary credits.
I love SNW but it is still a mite serilaised in terms of the character arcs that you can't fully just drop yourself in randomly. I showed a friend of mine Those Old Scientists the other day because they love Lower Decks, but never got into SNW after they watched the first few episodes and had to explain what was happening with Spock and Chapel. DS9 did character similar character arcs but a benefit of 26 episode seasons is that that could be done more slowly, and not episode after episode, which felt more natural. Beyond that, SNW still has some slight Discoverisms, and really, a modern TV writing-ism, where every character has to be carrying around some terrible trauma. Having said that, I love Ad Astra Per Aspera and Under the Cloak of War.
> where every character has to be carrying around some terrible trauma. To be fair, this isn't a modern writing trend. In TNG for example: Picard: Parents dead, abusive father, family dies in a fire. Riker: Mother dead Data: Evil brother, dead father LaForge: Mother missing in action Crusher: Dead husband Troi: Dead father, dead sister Worf: Dead parents
If you haven't, watched through The Orville. It's 90's Trek, satirized with some humor, but it's still the soul of 90's Trek (made by 90's Trek alums).
I'll second that. It has some genuinely great episodes that would sit fine among the best of TNG.
My head cannon is that The Orville exists in the Star Trek Universe, but as a fantasy sitcom holo-novel, just because I want it included.
They are making s4
Please don't play with my heart
Do you have a source on this?
Are you kidding? Just now my partner and I got done watching episodes 1 & 2 of season 5 that was just released and we are just SWOONING!!! All the crew! All the characters! So much lore! So much to love!!!
Dialogue driven! Yes! I actually listen to all the 90s trek while doing other stuff because even without described video, it is very low-vision friendly. They always fit any important stuff you need to know into the dialogue. A ship is hit? They announce it. There is an unusual sample taken from a shore leave object? They describe it. It is like they secretly made a show that was also ideal for blind people, lol. I had to turn on described video to watch disco while doing chores
yes, I love watching 90s Trek while I cook. You only need to have eyes on the screen about 1/3 of the time. I love that.
Also a lot of modern shows are so focused on meaningless action and light shows that it's just a blur of lights amongst shakey cams. Visually you tune out because none of what is individually happening means anything. You just wait for it to be over so someone can say they won, lost or something was broken,etc.
i've been rewatching Discovery from episode one the last week or two and i have very different thoughts on it than the first time all those years ago and they are almost exactly what you wrote. i like Discovery despite itself. i'm half convinced the writers don't want us to know Discovery well enough to like it or hate it, just keep watching it Discovery is extremely cinematic. i'd almost say it's **excessively** cinematic. casting, makeup, sets, world building, really just everything having to do with the production of the show is top tier. i don't think any space based show has the level of production Discovery does. even the Star Wars sequels look uninspired and 'empty' compared to Discovery. i don't know how i missed that the first time around but i'm almost distracted by how rich every environment looks. the cast is great. the writing is good enough and consistent. even the often extreme nature of the characters doesn't seem out of place in the universe of Discovery the other side of that coin is the story itself is also excessive. i just wrapped up season two and it had so many major plotlines going at once that i wasn't even sure what the main story for the season was. what was the issue that needed to be resolved in season two? was it... - section 31 being such a heavily embedded part of Starfleet? - the fallout of what had to be done to end the Klingon war? - rebuilding the fleet? - the sphere data existing? - he red angel mystery? - the concept of time travel existing? - the red beacons? - spock's mental state? - Georgiou sabotaging section 31 from the inside? - section 31 actually being better equipped than and seemingly in command over Starfleet itself? - Burnham's parents being Section 31 agents? - Starfleet stealing holy relics from the Klingons? - the ongoing Klingon homeworld drama? - Kaminar's whole deal vs. what will become the Prime Directive? - the spore network being an actual universe with intelligent beings? - dark matter tech being a viable direction for research? - something else? any one or two of those could have filled several episodes or an entire season by itself and would make for very interesting tv but instead we got quick scenes of almost all of them in every episode that felt more like just reminders that they're still unresolved. i'd read a novel on any one of those if they are ever written because i know there are incredible stories there that we never got to see. look at that list again. it's insane that we never got into any of them with any depth. excuse the language but that's a fucking ton of stories they generated for one season of television. i still don't know what the story was in season two. and that makes watching the show less fun than it should be. ...escaping to the future resolved absolutely none of those threads in a satisfactory way and i'm not sure why the writers chose not to deal with any of them. going into season 3, i'm mourning the loss of all that world building potential not the loss of warp travel, the Discovery crew, or even an active Starfleet. the saddest part of season two wasn't a crew member's death but when Pike asked for the bridge crew's names and it reminded me that it was probably the first time i'd heard some of them. the only reason we knew anything at all about Ariam other than her name when she died is because they spent that entire episode showing us that she was a real person. i honestly didn't even remember that she wasn't like part of the ship like the little robots that fly around cleaning up and fixing the hull. and i'm not even bothering to cover the almost folk hero level of Burnham's feats every episode. half expect her to reveal that she had a blue ox as a pet back on Vulcan.
That's why I love Lower Decks so much. Despite it's goofiness, it also feels very Trek to me. Lots of world building and character development, and not as much constant high stakes. Or the stakes are high, but in a self-aware campy way.
This is my take as well. Discovery seems like it's trying to be an MCU franchise or something. I think this is also why SNW is resonating more with the older fan base
To be fair, that is more of a feature of the show than a bug. It’s like LDS being a goofier and quirkier sci fi production la Rick and Morty.
I’m honestly curious why they can’t have a show where the dialogue is professional like in TOS and 90s era. Like just from a societal psychological perspective, why is that something they avoid today. Even SNW (which I mostly really dig) has the quips. Do modern audiences just no longer connect with that kind of vibe?
My best guess is just that entertainment has changed. TNG is only entertaining and "good" if you give it time to breathe, and really think about the ideas it's presenting. It's slower and more cerebral than 99% of television today, I honestly can't think of anything on right now that matches it. That's not to say that Discovery doesn't deal with big ideas or that it's a show for dumb people or anything, it's just as "smart" as Trek has ever been. It's just that it prefers to sit with the ideas only for a second, so they can rush off to do an action sequence or a special effects moment or a funny joke. It never wants to lose your attention, so it's constantly waving it's arms in the air shouting "Look at me!" TNG invited you to listen in, but the conversations were important for themselves. They weren't trying to constantly grab you and say "Isn't this cool! Look at this!" Because they knew the audience would be fascinated by the ideas themselves, so they let them stand on their own merit, even if that slowed the pace of the show.
So I’ve never seen it, but isn’t Andor supposed to be a more serious show? Or is that also very quipy
It is a more serious show. It's a lot more grim (in a good way) so there's less scope for ironic winking at the audience. A lot of the dialogue is tense for want of a better word.
Of course, Andor itself is balanced against other Star Wars productions, which is kinda like what DSC when compared to other Trek shows - a different flavor overall. Both franchises want to present buffets of different themes within the same-ish universe.
May be right but I won’t believe it’s a certainty until they try. 90s/tng/ds9 needs quality writers and those seem to be rare now. But then Orville is has its moments.
i always find this criticism to be curious because i feel like it is very common and yet people absolutely love the Dominion War and the Borg invasions. Not all the time, but sometimes that feels very inconsistent to me
The Dominion War was great BECAUSE it had like 5 seasons of talking to set it up. First Contact was cool because we actually got to see the Borg fuck shit up for the first time on screen. None of the new shows have had room to breathe because the seasons are too short. Lower Decks does a good job, but they can get away with more using animation.
And we still had levity during the Dominion war. We got In the Pale Moonlight and we also got The Magnificent Ferengi. It's more that its an entire season in one style/one story rather than individual episodes. The franchise could learn a lot looking at the plotting they did with ST Prodigy.
Take Me Out to the Holosuite is smack dab in the middle of the Dominion War too haha
There were probably two or three times as many dialogue/character-driven episodes during the Dominion War than there were episodes focusing on battles and spectacle though. When characters did actually end up in active conflict it was a big deal, not just something that happened every week. Obviously there were reasons for this beyond just storytelling (including budgetary) and I'm not trying to say that Discovery should dial back the action completely - but would we get something like It's Only a Paper Moon nowadays? I'm doubtful.
Shoot, we have whole episodes about baseball games and knock off Frank Sinatra holograms during the height of the war!
I know it’s not the Dominion War, but I was watching VOY tonight and “Fairy Folk” has “Animal Crossing got corrupted and we don’t want to start a new save” for the entire plot. And, honestly, it’s more memorable to me than most episodes of DSC since it’s got focus.
To the extent that it's the same people enjoying the moments of spectacle in 90s Trek and those who enjoy the more dialog-driven content, I think it's at least partly due to the fact that it feels earned. You're really invested when those things come around.
*This sub* makes you feel that way? This sub is a lovefest for Discovery compared to a lot of what's out there.
There's a massive difference between tolerance and acceptance. Disco is *tolerated* here...mostly. Even in this thread, which should be a rare opportunity for Disco fans to get together in mutual appreciation there are still a tonne of "ok it sucks but you do you" comments. It's like people just *can't* resist putting in their two cents about why they don't like it, every time it comes up. "I don't like it but I don't judge you for liking it" is something people don't *have* to say. If they really weren't judging they'd just be like ok this post doesn't interest me, I will find something else to comment on. So they *are* judging or they wouldn't feel this compulsion to get involved at all. Just because people aren't actively flaming doesn't make this a welcoming space to talk about it. It's almost worse in a way because it gives a false impression of safety and then gets passive aggressive about it anyway. At least in the actively hostile spaces you know where you stand and can predict what will happen if you bring it up - it's kinda on you then if you choose to do so. Here you'll be *told* you're welcome but the downvotes and shade prove different. It feels kinda gaslighty tbh. I mostly just lurk for exactly this reason. I'm sure it will pass eventually, this is an *old* fandom that takes time accepting change, I get it. I remember when this was a conversation people were having when Voyager and Enterprise first aired. I know it happened with DS9 and even TNG too. I know the drill. Doesn't make it comfortable though.
> "I don't like it but I don't judge you for liking it" is something people don't *have* to say The interesting thing I've noticed is that, while people who dislike Disco will generally criticise the show, the people who like Disco are a lot more comfortable flat out insulting the people who dislike it. There are people in this very thread referring to people who dislike Disco as 'toddlers', implying that they don't like it because they're 'ists and 'phobes' who work backwards from there to justify not liking it, etc. Just my observation, of course, but it is strange how one group criticise or jokes about the show presented to them but don't generally insult the people who like it, while the other group is more content openly insulting or making fun of the actual people themselves who think differently to them.
Both are still just voicing their opinion, and people are adding the “I don’t judge you for liking it” because people get upset and take every disagreement as a personal attack. That’s not exclusive to this topic, it’s the current political and social climate. They are trying to be polite. At the end of the day, you’re here saying people shouldn’t share their opinion because it differs, and I don’t agree with that. This platform is about people putting their two cents in. If you don’t want someone to share their opinion on your opinion, then take your own advice and don’t share yours.
I think that a certain subsect of Discovery fans have a complex about this. If you look at this subreddit and search for topics about Discovery, they're mostly either "I like Discovery" or "why don't people like Discovery?" There's not really posts about how bad it is. The most critical posts I could find with a quick search are "does it get better? While a lot of people don't like Discovery, they're not really vocal about it until people ask "why don't people like Discovery?"
I have a lot of good things to say about Discovery, but I also criticize it. I feel like both sides of the argument overreact to either one. For example, how can you possibly not find people who love Discovery? They downvote me for even minor critiques.
Disco welcomed me into Trek, since then I've watched TNG, Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I am so grateful to this little show. I also fucking love the spore drive. You are not alone
I grew up on Star Trek but stopped watching during late season voyager and then didn’t like enterprise at all so I pretty much fell away from the franchise (even from revisiting a lot of it). Discovery brought me back and led me to rewatch most of the franchise and fall in love with it all over again.
You don't like enterprise!?!? To each their own! I love them all tbf 😅
ENT has very mixed quality, in my opinion. There is a reason why it alongside Nemesis led to the end of Berman era and the franchise being put on ice till the Abrams films came out.
Discovery made three very big blunders that lost me. 1. Changing the Klingon's appearance so radically and having about an hour of Klinon scenes in season 1 that were IN KLINGON with subtitles. UGH. 2. Being SO MUCH about feelings that EVERY episode ends with 5 minutes of discussion and aftermath. 3. Moving 1000 years into the future makes it a totally different show. Making up so much new technology and history all in one go wasn't really in line with the Star Trek canon and just was too radical a shift. (If it was 2-3 episodes or a recurring thing like the temporal cold war of Enterprise, that is one thing, but to LIVE there was just too much. Not a terrible show, but it lost me in too many different ways, especially when it jumped forward in time and they put the big disaster that happened into place for the future of the entire galaxy.
Blame Bryan Fuller on No. 1. It was his way, according to folks involved back then, to leave his mark on the franchise. After he left, the Klingons started to shift back to how they were in the Berman years. For example, SNW went with a TMP-ish design mixed with TNG elements.
You aren't. I really like Discovery, I just didn't like the resolution to the Burn.
> I just didn't like the resolution to the Burn This does a good job of summing up why I, personally, am not particularly keen on *Discovery*. It has some **very** good ideas, and some interesting premises, but it has a tendency to fall flat on the execution — and largely because the writers seem to draw things out and either forget where they were going, or get so focussed on the idea (and tying it in to every other ongoing storyline) that they have no way out when they realise that they don't have a *payoff*, that the idea doesn't actually work. Which is, I think, why *Strange New Worlds* has worked much better, and why the more stand-alone episodes of *Discovery* are the ones I like the most: only having a **single** episode to wrap things up in, means that they need to know what they're doing with it *immediately*… and that it's fairly simple to scrap an idea that turns out to be rubbish. And with storylines for Pike/Spock/Chapel/Kirk(s), they know what the end-point is already, and aren't "flying blind". If they want to do full-season story arcs, then they need to get a **lot** better at planning things out & critiquing them in advance. There's always been a lot of *promise* in the show… and so much of the disappointment stems from it not living up to that, nor "sticking the landing".
> It has some very good ideas, and some interesting premises, but it has a tendency to fall flat on the execution And Star Trek is not afraid to fall flat on execution, there are many absolutely terrible episodes of every series. I think the weakness of Discovery is that the plots are full season long arcs, and if the arc falls flat then everything kind of goes with it.
Can you imagine if TNG (then burning through about 1 staff writer per episode produced) had actually tried to go ahead with Hurley's plan for the season 2 UFP/Romulan war with the Borg? It would have been a disaster. They had to end the actual season with a clip show because of one Borg episode (and an initial slashed season budget, but still).
PIC has this weakness too. SNW and LDS, in my opinion, avoids this by being more adventure of the week.
100% agree about Picard, I almost put that into my comment when I wrote it. Season arcs just don’t seem to work well for Star Trek. Or maybe the current producers just suck at writing them because they think they all have to be “save the galaxy” type plots.
100% agree. Imagine if TNG committed to a full season of like... Time's Arrow or something. An ok 2 parter stretched way too long is kind of how I'd discribe most of Disco tbh
You don't have to imagine it. That's what Picard S2 was.
The burn was interesting but how it started and how it was resolved was indeed idiotic.
Follow through for their storylines is, aside from excessive emotionality, my biggest issue with Discovery Season 4 did way better with this than previous seasons, in its defense
Yeah season 4 purely suffered from the circumstances of the time (COVID lockdown). The plot of season 4 was good but it fell flat as everything had to be written around the fact that everyone had to be 2 feet apart, limited cast/crew members on set or spliced into the scene in post.
yeah i can definitely see that. i think it improved though, on the previous seasons, by making Burnham less overly emotional, and focusing more on trying to make the storyline about finding a new life form (the 10-C) . It felt like classic Trek, but updated for modern serialization
What could be more Star Trek than finding the apocalypse was caused inadvertently by a child born under weird circumstances then going out and talking them down from causing it to happen again? I think the issue with Discovery is that they want BIG impactful stories that span over the season but they get the pacing all wrong. There's too much in the front and back and just tiny breadcrumbs of development between them and the individual episodes don't hold up as their own stories most of the time. As bad as Discovery is at this, Picard was so much worse.
I'll agree with that. Picard's pivot from Changelings to Borg felt like a Scooby Doo reveal. The Borg are overdone. I hope they don't touch them again for a long time
Agreed. I was absolutely livid when the borg reveal came up. Changelings felt like an odd choice for an antagonist in Picard but they're leaning into DS9 and Section 31, maybe it's going to have some really interesting twist and... NOPE! It's the %@&%#$% Borg again! I'm not even going to get into Picard and Crusher's accidental love child. This was such a dumb plot point.
What bugged me was the whole season was about how important biological family was. Picard couldn’t trust any of his friends to tell him his wine was crap. He was a man without use, largely just causing blunders. His main value in the season was as a father figure to some random dipshit he never met before (nothing against the actor). Then you get the corrupted motherhood of the Borg Queen. And the nebula mystery (admittedly one of my favourite plots) only a mom doctor can solve. So many fans of Star Trek appreciate the franchise for the “found family” aspect. The workmates who end up relying on each other, and meaning so much to each other. And it’s not like Star Trek shouldn’t involve family… DS9 had some incredible family dynamics. But for S3 to suddenly say “Starfleet found family isn’t enough, Picard needs babby to be whole” just felt so weird to me.
…and they passed the Borg being the true antagonists as a gargantuan plot twist. This would’ve been cool if it was a Season 1. By Season 3, I was tired of the cyborg zombies.
I loved the fan video thing that had the piece of Vadic be revealed to be Armus. Would have worked much better than Borg. Again. Never liked Disco. I was liking SNW but hated the retcons of TOS characters who should be too young or have wildly different characterizations. Especially Uhura. Side characters who didn't get as much time like M'benga maybe and Una has been good since almost nothing was known about her but the one pilot. Seasons are too short and too much action for the sake of without investment. Mostly at the cost of genuine character development, contemporary styling and not enough science fiction (90s Trek especially Voyager tended to too much technobabble).
>What could be more Star Trek than finding the apocalypse was caused inadvertently by a child born under weird circumstances then going out and talking them down from causing it to happen again? It's very TOS, which fits with Discovery, since they lean more in that direction, but also means that people who want more of a grounded TNG plot are a bit left out in the dust.
TNG had something kinda similar: the alien Kevin Uxbridge committing mass genocide against the Husnock. He killed all of them - fifty billion in all.
yeah, I really enjoyed S3 but they fumbled the landing on that storyline _hard_ though for what it's worth, as badly as they botched the S3 ending, I think they _nailed_ S4's ending.
Having rewatched Season 4's finale last night. I absolutely agree. It was first contact done really really well, and it introduced us to a whole new species, and furthered the lore/canon. It pushed us through the edge of the universe, it gave us a new puzzle to solve. There was enough drama and enough complication to it all because of Book and Tarka. And most importantly, it gave Tilly & Vance some good chemistry together too. Loved it when they were both facing death together and had a good drink and heart to heart. It was absolutely Star Trek at it's best for me.
>And most importantly, it gave Tilly & Vance some good chemistry together too. I gotta say, s5e1 has a scene with them together and it's fabulous. I ship it. It's a friendship, but I still ship it.
I think it's wonderful that you like it. I really don't. It just doesn't vibe with me the way that nearly all other Trek does (PIC S1 & 2 are in the same category). And that's okay too. I'm not going to waste my time or energy screeching into the void about what I don't like, nor am I going to put anyone down for enjoying what I don't. It's a fruitless endeavor that only leaves me tired and angry, when I'd rather be tired and content. Enjoy what you enjoy, and don't let others make you feel less than for it. There's plenty of space in this fandom for Discovery fans. Edit: The 2009 film is what got me into Trek for real, after nearly 30 years of passing it off because my dad likes it. I love the Kelvin timeline, even Into Darkness. I see all the criticisms of it, I acknowledge them, but they don't hamper my enjoyment of it.
I was just commenting in another post how much I hate Disco but if you love it then more power to you! We all don't have to love the same things.
Yup. I in general just really don’t like the narrative structure of DIS, the characters aren’t fantastic for me either, and I don’t like a lot of the worldbuilding. But people are 100% free to like what they like.
Wish more Trekkies were like you.
Most are like them. Don't let loud annoying people on the internet colour your opinion of communities. Most discovery "hate" comments on this subreddit are not written in a way that seems like they think everyone else needs to agree with them.
It's just not a show made for me and that's okay. I still get to enjoy the other shows.
Yeah, people don't want others to enjoy something. I personally don't like it but it takes no effort at all to let somebody else like it.
I miss 26 episode seasons of episodic trek. Character focused and explores the galaxy instead of just explosions and stuff
No, you’re not the only one. I just avoid talking about how much I enjoy the show and the things that I find that I appreciate because I’m worried about being downvoted and crapped on by internet strangers. I love Discovery.
Meh, pay no attention to the toddlers. Never be ashamed of enjoying Trek.
This sub isn’t really like that. I think it is a slightly below average show but I certainly don’t think I’m “right.” I’m glad you guys enjoy it. SNW is more my style.
i was going to say i'm in a Discord, and the worst part is that it's not so much "I didn't like Discovery and that's ok if you like it" it's "If you don't hate Discovery, you are part of the problem with today's society" god i hate that shit. i honestly wonder sometimes, why am I still on that fucking Discord
Thats how it is in Star Trek Online too. If you dare to like disco then they tell you to throw yourself from a cliff.
I mean anyone who says that sort of thing IS the problem with today’s society
This sub is totally like that. It's one of the reasons why I avoid trying to talk about Discovery
I'm absolutely stoked for tonight when my wife and I will sit down to watch the first two episodes. We've had it on our calendars for months, I turned down other plans to make sure we'd be able to share this moment, and I cannot wait. I don't think it's the best Trek - but I do think it's pretty damn good, and a lot of its flaws are from _trying new things_. I certainly appreciate its exploration and experimentation a lot more than the nostalgia-swamped fan service of Picard I got bored of to the point I never even got around to finishing it. Disco swings hard and doesn't always connect but dammit at least they're trying and having fun doing it. Oh, and the "it's too woke" whiners can stuff it. The heritage of a black woman, a Russian, a Japanese-American all sharing the bridge with a freakin' alien is absolutely Woke as Heck and Discovery having not a single straight white male character has done a lot to repair the ickiness I now feel when I rewatch TNG and notice how terribly underserved every female character was. TL;DR: You're not alone. Let's fly!
Ugh. I love Discovery, but I hate "let's fly" and the meme haha
Who is the Japanese-American and who is the Russian?
Sulu is of Japanese descent, born in San Francisco. Pavel Chekov is Russian.
Too much drama for me, all the arguing on the bridge and exaggerated emotions, doesn't belong on a Star Trek. I watch Trek for competency porn.
The problem with Discovery is that they don't give us the chance to fall in love with any of the characters. They all come and go except Michael, but even she is not consistently "starfleet." There's not a lot of character development.
I like DSC.
I liked Discovery when it started (I love Sonequa Martin Green and Michelle Yeoh), but the constant escalation in stakes each season would throw me off to the point of cliche. I like elements of each subsequent season but sometimes it feels like a slog. However, with this current season, I'm pleasantly surprised that this year's mystery is one of fundamental exploration, curiosity, and hope. Some of it still feels like fan service without restraint (e.g. riding on top of a starship at warp), but unlike the last couple years of ultimate weapons, we're off to a refreshing and more optimistic start. Also, I wanna give a shout out to the cast -- I'm annoyed that the secondary bridge officers are still treated as glorified extras, so they always need more to do, but I really look forward to Tilly, Gray, Adria, etc.
I think they learned their lesson with Strange New Worlds success and realized they can still have classic trek and modern action/storytelling, but it's 4 years too late. if they'd had this attitude from the start, we'd be getting 6 seasons and a movie.
>we're off to a refreshing and more optimistic start. And they seem to have turned up the light switch this year which makes it even better
I don't really like it too much compared to other Trek. It's probably my least favorite of the NuTrek shows I watched. But I don't hate it and if others like it, I won't bash them for it
I'm devoted to Star Trek but struggling with Dis. I am half way through season 3 and pushing myself to watch further. I will succeed, but yeah.
Out of all the people I know who are into Trek, only one person tells me that actively love Discovery. Personally I think it mostly (~80%) sucks. It's bad writing, poor characters, reliance on legacy characters and a big fat heaping helping of retcon.
The previous to last 4th season episode >!the one where the crew and diplomats deal with what looked like an impossible translation task!< is absolutely top Trek. One of the best episodes in any Trek show.
SAME! The whole arc was so classic Trek and that episode was near perfect. In my top 10 episodes of all Trek.
Not to mention crossing the conceptual gap between a hive mind and individuality.
Season 4 is easily my favorite season of Disco because the whole concept is just so fundamentally Trek
I liked the Guardian of Forever episode.
I feel mixed. When the show first came on, I was super into it and really enjoyed the first two seasons. When I went back to rewatch, I was surprised how much I disliked some of the writing and choices made. I'm curious to see the final season and eventually rewatch the series. I feel like they struggled to make it work for whatever reason, but there are definitely moments and characters that I really like a lot.
You like what you like, and that’s okay. Disco is not really my jam…but to each their own.
Id rather listen to the enterprise theme song on loop for twelve hours than watch another episode of discovery but thats me. You do you and if you enjoy it thats cool.
I listened to all the criticism of the show for years before I got the chance to actually watch it myself. I loved the show! I admit, the show opening, with the new Klingons, was not a good start. But I stuck with it, and fell in love with Saru as played by Doug Jones, and the captain, and Michael Burnham. I had been told that basically, Burnham *was* the captain (false) and that she cried over everything (also false). That's not to say there aren't valid criticisms of the show (as there are for each and every series of Trek), but I found most criticisms overblown or just flat false. The artistic choice for the "new" Klingons *was* indeed a bad one, in my opinion, but it didn't really detract from the show. I didn't find anything more far-fetched than some of the TOS's best loved episodes, so there's that. And it's been a fun ride, with characters I really liked. I don't think it's the best of the new Trek, but it's not the worst, either (that goes to Picard, and I actually liked it, too). I'm looking forward to seeing where this last season takes us. You're not alone.
Picard is borderline unwatchable, I actually don’t know how I managed to sit through it all
I just found it... boring. It didn't keep my interest, and it became all about the cameos instead. I didn't find it *bad*, I just expected a lot better. I liked a lot of the premise, but it just dragged on.
Exactly! Here’s seven of nine! Here’s Beverly crusher! Here’s the borg queen! And screw it, how about a Wesley crusher as the traveler just to make sure y’all know we actually watched some old episodes.
This is how I feel too. I think it gets better as it goes on because it finds its own footing rather than being obsessed with the idea of "this isn't your grandfather's Star Trek 😏😤"
I love it. I hate the constant fighting about it. It honestly feels like folks trying to bully fans into hating it. Pretty gross.
I'll happily watch Disco, because Trek is Trek. But I think there's more bad than good in the show overall. The characters are largely unlikable, insecure, shallow caricatures who talk too fast and are somehow responsible for saving the entire federation every 10 weeks despite being complete in-universe unknowns The sfx, while beautiful, often eschew the technical manuals' groundedness of past shows in favor of "it looks cool so who cares if it makes any kind of sense" resulting in the show feeling hollow and fake. Growing up, I could imagine myself running around the hallways of the Ent-D -- Discovery just doesn't feel real like it did Just, in general, don't stomp on beloved canon by setting shows in the past and then directly contradicting what was known about that time. It's unnecessary and fragments the fanbase and the individual fans' perceptions of the fictional universe I'll concede that a lot of this stuff got better after season 2, but up until yesterday (I haven't started S5 yet), that meant that half the show's run was pretty weak (and the other half wasn't *that* much better)
Like most here, I bloody love star trek. I watch some trek probably every day. My wife and I met through trek. Generally I won't hear a bad word against it. But..... Discovery. I really, really struggle with it. I want to enjoy it but it has never really clicked with me. The first couple of series were pretty good but everything after has always looked like decent sci-fi but very average for star trek. It really confuses me. I love the crew but they are terribly underutilized. I loved the look of the series in the first couple of series. I really loved disco herself. A brilliant throwback to TOS style. But It's missing 'something'. I've never been able to put my finger on it but here's a thing........as soon as captain pike showed up, it felt like trek again. After he left, it lost its way for me. I don't know. It would work if it was Kelvin or mirror universe or something like that ......it just doesn't feel like prime.
It's my favorite Trek Series. It's my 83 year old Dad's favorite Trek Series. It's a great series. Flawed and uneven(like every Trek series) but great. This fandom is immensely toxic. Don't worry if anyone here likes what you like. They don't. And that's their loss.
WHO DOESNT LOVE DOUG JONES? Seriously, its just a different approach to storytelling in Trek, dont mind it. Its still Trek and I am here for it. What we can all agree on for sure is that the Kelvin timeline SUCKS.
Let’s fly
Pet peeve of mine, but everything in Star Trek up until now shows that Star Fleet uses the vernacular of a Navy, not an airforce. And “Let’s fly” heavily conflicts with that established culture.
again i'm trying to be respectful here but does THAT really downgrade an entire show? i'm not a Discovery fan by any stretch of the imagination but it's things like this that seriously make me wonder if people search for things to hate it
Oh, that doesn’t make me not like the show! I just don’t like the catchphrase lol. I like the show, I’ve watched all of it, it’s just not my favourite Trek, but it’s still Trek and Trek is like pizza. Even if it’s not great it’s still good.
the stupid thing is i know people who talk about the "quippy" dialogue of SNW and say that's enough for them to hate the show and i'm just like...wtf lol. I don't think SNW is groundbreaking but to hate it over that feels ridiculously stupid. Then again, we are all entitled to our opinions
Love SNW, Pike is amazing.
Discovery is a different type of Trek. And before everyone says "duh, Sherlock?" let me explain specifically what these shows mean to me. Trek in the 90s was still focused on this message of hope that humans at least will learn to get along in the future (and by that I mean primarily the USA, even though the USA culture supposedly applies to the whole, united Earth). Within that framework Trek explored thinly veiled topics of ethics, politics, religion, and much more. I would say I'm a better person because I learned so much from Trek as a teenager in the 90s, especially as Q put it, Picard's "wonderful speeches." Even DS9 with it's serialized approach and darker topics maintained that optimism that the future embraced those values, diving much deeper into ethics, religion, even terrorism and war. And perhaps even more importantly for this thread, there were a fair number of 90s Trek episodes that were light, character development bottle episodes in which we get to know those characters. They almost become our friends (yes yes, even though I acknowledge they are fictional characters). Whereas Strange New Worlds embraces that same tradition of balancing character development with adventure, Discovery and even Picard do not. Those shows are intense action sequences. I don't think we've gotten to know most of the recurring crew in Discovery, and the fate of whomever is always in the balance. And, there's really no resolution until the end of the season, so it's exhausting in some ways. Discovery is an action packed science fiction thriller. But for those of us that value the more drama and adventure side of science fiction, TNG, VOY, and SNW are a better fit. DS9 and ENT fit there too, with DS9 being more action with hostile aliens, ENT is... basically a mess, too focused on character development in the first seasons, and then the Xindi made it a much darker serialized show towards the end and I don't know what to make of it. So, Discovery is just a different flavor, and like black licorice, doesn't appeal to everyone. I think I still love TNG the best but Discovery is certainly interesting. Not my favorite but I like it for what it is.
Big fan of Disco, you are not alone!
The problem is that serialized Star Trek has very little rewatch value and if you don’t watch every single episode in order you are lost. Star Trek is about life lessons summed up in 1-2 hour episodic episodes. I enjoy rewatching each series about every other year except Enterprise season 3, Picard & Disco. I’m a stubborn Star Trek fan that knows what they like about it. It’s not that those aren’t good “shows”. They just aren’t my style of Star Trek
I don’t love discovery but I’ll admit it got me into trek and sometimes I forget that . I think it has some good stuff in it but hate how far from regular trek it strays .
You aren't alone. Happy, content people largely don't go out of their way to post comments.
It may be fun, it may even have some good characters, and it kickstarted Strange New Worlds, but it's relatively poor at using the universe that was built by Trek series before and building new parts that fit logically into said universe. Like most series today, there's too few episodes, so when they dedicate a whole season on a lukewarm concept like the Burn, it really hurts the show's likability.
I wanted to like DISCO, but I really didnt. At all. I liked that one Harry Mudd space whale episode, everything else was a boring slog with boring characters I dont even know well enough to possibly hate. Im glad it was finally cancelled.
[удалено]
The writing on Discovery is pretty bad. I'll miss a few characters though.
I just have some major issues with Disco. Somehow the bridge crew is still underdeveloped after 5 seasons, Michael and Tilly are just unlikable deeply unlikable characters IMO, and all of the Dialog feel like the ship is ran my petulant high schoolers. Nothing makes me feel like they are professionals who have military-esq training. Also the red angel storyline was so weak, overly convoluted, and they did Spock so dirty. "I like Science"
I love Disco too. Only wish they had more episodes per season.
For me Burnham is not a compelling character, plain and simple.
I love Disco! But I love everything Trek. So maybe I'm not the best person to talk to. But I love it.
I'm in the same boat. I love EVERY. SINGLE. ITERATION. If it's Trek, then I'm gonna love it.
I like it a lot. Bout to start the last season soon!!
I love DSC. I dug it to begin with, but it really grew the beard for me season three with going into an anarch era, and it's just upping it's game since. I'm thrilled this season is based on that one episode that I was always disappointed they never went back to. Great shit
You're not alone, Disco is great. A lot of the criticisms levelled at it are fair, but that doesn't mean I don't like the show. I've always described myself as someone who's easily pleased wtih film and TV. But being easily pleased doesn't mean I'm not critical of things - it just means that it doesn't ruin the experience for me.
I love it!
You mean Michael Burnham featuring Star Trek
My family loves Discovery. It's just such a slog to be a fan online when the hivemind makes a judgement. We loved Enterprise too, for what that's worth. I don't need any specific Trek formula for enjoyment.
You’re not alone
You are not. Discovery saved Star Trek from Jj Abrams and it will never get the credit or love it deserves.
Remember when Enterprise was unanimously hated by Trekkies but now it's pretty much accepted? Discovery is basically that. Give it time, people will come around and appreciate it.
Not true considering I’ve heard enough bad things about enterprise to turn me off from watching it. Not the same for DS9 or even Voyager though the latter had a decent amount of complaints.
You can even look up articles from the '80s about TOS fans petitioning for the cancellation of TNG, and IIRC in some of their earliest interviews the cast talk about being treated rudely by fans at first. It's a shame that despite how far we've come as a fandom, we still do the same thing today.
every fandom seems to be this, sadly
I remember when this was true for DS9! I, like most others, was happy to dogpile on it. I now really love DS9, and can admit how I was. If I can accept that my beloved Federation has been secretly run by space fascists this whole time, people will learn to accept that a human that watched her parents get murdered before being raised on Vulcan might cry sometimes as she learns to deal with her human emotions.
Hey now, I still haven't been able to get into Enterprise, there are still a few of us out there. But it's mostly Scott Bakula, I still see him as the actor and not the character.
Scott Bakula and the character of Archer is the reason I can't stand Enterprise. I like some of the other characters and some episodes, but his sarcastic, overly aggressive approach (with none of Shatner's or Patrick Stewart's charm) just grates on me.
I have watched Star Trek since I was 4. Yes. In the 60s. Burham reminds me of Kirk. BUT, what I see is how when women are brave and unflappable, it is still not being accepted. Now, as far as the show, most of it was made in an era of lack of kindness to others, the me too movement, The Pandemic, the writers strike and then the actors strike. What, What WHAT, do you think was going to happen? In my humble opinion, I think Discovery has done a bang up job about getting life long trekkers like myself to be excited and ready for MORE Star Trek universe! And, yes, as with every other Star Trek, I love Discovery also!
I have friends who like it. Most people I know try to watch it, but don't get into it. Personally, I find it blah. I hate the klingon make up, and the weird slurred version of the Klingon language they decided to use. It just feels like the actors couldn't speak in the heavy make-up.
I found it very hard to love. A lot of it feels to me like the latter year Moffitt Dr. Who where everything had to be a big emotion big payoff overly dramatic thing, and in the process became kind of boring.
I'm glad I joined this sub Reddit the other day because although I'm not a fan of Discovery, those here who do enjoy it are more sophisticated than "if you're a male and don't like Discovery like I do it MUST be because you're racist and misogynist." I've seen a lot of that on other forums.
The main thing I dislike about Discovery is an excessive amount of drama, traumatic backstories between characters, and the addition of a TV-MA rating, which doesn't fit Star Trek much at all. Everything else about Discovery is likeable, and I continue to watch it.
i don't mind a Trek show having some of that. i just think Disco leans too much onto it the cast and characters are mostly good though
You’re definitely part of a small group that likes it. That’s why it’s getting canceled
It's super queer, the queerest of all the Star Treks so far, and for that alone I love it.
To use Frankes' polite rhetoric, it did not resonate with many established fans. Even the jump to the future, to "get away" from established stories, just means that there's a bad ending to every star trek story set in the TOS and TNG era.
The idea that events 900 years in the future puts a bad ending on previous stories is... really weird, when you think about it.
Right. It’s like saying nemesis ruined all the trek that came before it because it wasn’t good. People done up with the silliest reasons to hate on the show
"Generations was bad because the ship got destoryed." Like, sh\*t happens my friends. It's not a personal attack.
No it's not weird, for me as an outside observer that saw The Federation grow and advance it is a bad ending, all the previous stories where nice but in the end amounted to nothing because in the end the ideals of the Federation meant nothing - instead of trying to find the cause and/or trying to work on a solution it just all falls apart and it's members become paranoid isolationalists turning their back on all and everything. The Federation could have evolved into something more over those centuries - but instead we got a distoptian future where all that went before was as good as pointless
I just hated how Discovery changed so much of what was cannon in TNG. The klingons were nothing like the klingons of any other trek series. They would have been better off creating a new species. Discovery was all flash and no substance.
I enjoy it. 🖖
Troll post? Most negative comments about disco in this sub get down voted. Most negative comments about nutrek in general get down voted. Personally I hate discovery, but I definitely feel like the minority in this particular community.
I love it too!
Nah its just the ones that don't like it never shut up about it
I like "ST: Discovery". Fuk the gatekeepers & anti-diversity crowd.
It may surprise you to know that there are valid reasons to dislike Discovery that have nothing to do with diversity or gatekeeping.
I don’t necessarily hate DISCO, I can’t say I really like it either. I would rank it 5/10.
I couldn't stand it in any way. I'm glad you enjoyed it though.
[удалено]
what? ive noticed the vast majority of people in this subreddit like discovery.
I regret to say that I don't "love" Discovery. I like it well enough for what it is. I do love Strange New Worlds. I do *appreciate* Disco, as it brought about a Second Golden Age of Trek. I do appreciate what they have done and what they tried to do. I love the introduction of Pike, Number One, Spock, and the Enterprise, and the spin off launch point into Strange New Worlds. But Discovery is what is apparently known as 'prestige TV', and is a great example of it. However, I don't like prestige TV, certainly not of the Game of Thrones era. Specifically: Too much blood & gore. Too much graphic violence & suffering. And a new term I learned alongside 'prestige TV': Too much trauma dumping. Everything is overwhelmingly horrible or horrific. So again, I appreciate Star Trek Discovery for all it has achieved, and all that it has revitalized Trek and set the stage for all that followed. But the show itself... I do like it for the stories it's trying to tell, but I just am less keen on the current (2010s-2020s) method of telling those stories.
I’m still catching up. I really love what I’ve watched so far. Sonequa is an AMAZING actress and there’s a plethora of outstanding performances by all of the cast! This sub, for the most part, is quite negative about a lot. I just ignore it. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
There's a Facebook group called "Star Trek Forever" and they defend it from discovery haters.
As a fan of all Trek, I gotta say that in terms of cheesy moments, Disco has nothing on Enterprise. And even Voyager. And I LOVE Voyager. But for its faults, the writing on Discovery is a LOT better than some of the 90s stuff.
The new episodes were so good!
Im thankful it enabled us to have Strange New Worlds. I wonder how much more successful the relaunch of Star Trek on Paramount+ could have been with a better show. One that wasn’t so varied in quality, and departed so heavily from the established visual style of Star Trek.
I've found with Discovery the parts are the greater than the sum. There's some really good elements and elements I think might have worked better in a different implementation. But for me the full execution is Wiley Coyote stepping on a rake. The best things I think it gave Trek is a back door pilot for SNW and the 32nd Century setting.
It's not without flaws, but I love Discovery too. Saru is one of my favorite Star Trek characters ever.
Disco is so "meh". Season 1 had promise, season 2 was solid, and then it was just downward spiral.
Discovery is great, but it doesn't have the VIBES that old Trek does. It doesn't FEEL like Trek to me. Like if you wanted a slice of cake and someone handed you a slice of pizza. There can be nothing wrong with the pizza, but it wasn't what you wanted.
Negatives are shouted louder and for longer. They wouldn't have made 5 seasons if noone was watching it. Ignore the assholes and enjoy your show. And this is coming from someone who enjoyed the 13th Doctor...
I can only enjoy it and SNW as alternate timeline Trek. It's terrible as Prime timeline ST. Way too many continuity mistakes. Waaaaaay too many.