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Discovery

Star Trek Discovery – Season 5

And now for the final season of Star Trek Discovery. I have a whole mess of notes to make sense of, and a lot of them are more just, about the series in general. So let’s see where we boldly go on this one.

Actually, it turns out it’s not that much. I kind of had a hard time caring enough to finish this series and season and the whole series has felt a bit downhill for a while.

After feeling a bit more like Star Trek for the last few seasons, Discovery seems like its fully embraces its Not Trekiness. It feels a lot more like Star Wars for some reason (again). They even picked up that Sith girl from Ahsoka. Ok, not really, they just told ok her hair and style.

Is this the end? Well, actually, it is, I guess.

They also pulled Tilly back, though she doesn’t really feel like she does a lot this season. The cast on this show has been so weird all around, and I wonder if it’s something behind the scenes happening or what. The Bridge Crew is almost entirely new people, and the few remaining old characters, Tilly and Saru mostly, feel like they have been shoved off to the back burner the way the old Bridge Crew were.

Owosekun and Detmer get their leave “explained” and “acknowledged” but neither even appears in the episode where it happens.

We do get a new First Officer, again, and Adira is more interesting again, without Grey, except the writers completely forgot they were a Trill. It really has not come up at all since Season 3, and it amounted to, knowing where the Federation is, and suddenly knowing how to play the cello. I mean, why don’t we get to see that more? It’s little things like, “Let’s show this character playing cello” that make Star Trek interesting. This whole series really is just ‘The Michael Burnham Show.” Adira being an Ensign is fine, they are inexperienced in Starfleet. Adira being and acting like a know nothing after having many lifetimes of memories, is a whole new annoyance.

The Progenitor from Star Trek TNG

Just to wrap up the Adira thing, they did go back to Grey again, on Trill. And they broke up. It kind of felt like their story was going there, as I mentioned in the Season 4 write-up. I am surprised they didn’t just do it back then, but I guess they didn’t have time with the Burnham show going on.

As for the new First Officer, he is a disgraced captain, whom Burnham decides will be her new bestie. The whole setup is honestly kind of weird, they meet up on Not Tatooine and ride together on some Not Speeder Bikes and then he gets in trouble for screwing up and letting the bad guys get away. It’s kind of forgivable because he is probably the most interesting character in the season. It’s kind of a shame that the rest of the old regulars all seem to have been dumped with not a lot of characterization while this guy swoops in and gets to be interesting.

Back to the core plot.

It’s another MacGuffin Hunt chase. And it’s very literal this time. Find a thing, solve a puzzle, find the next thing, repeat.

In general, I actually really really really hate this specific plot device in everything, not just here. Indiana Jones, for example, uses it. My main problems are, traps and puzzles which survived hundreds of thousands of years undisturbed. I could go with it for 1 or 2 parts of these puzzle chains, but half a dozen?

Plus, anyone could stumble upon the middle section of a puzzle chain, or even the end, but generally speaking, only the last step actually matters.

The puzzle chain leads to quite a bit more surface level action, which is part of why this all feels more like Star Trek again.

They did do a little nod back to the Mirror Universe, though it really leans into the whole “how did this all survive hundreds of years? At least they are consistent with the Mirror Universe references. No mirror people, but they find the abandoned Mirror Universe Enterprise and pull it through the wormhole. It’s basically an excuse to reuse the Strange New Worlds sets.

Also the Federation is going to be really confused when Burnham shows up with yet another 23rd century star ship in nearly perfect condition.

They also found logs that implied the Mirror Universe Terrans from the ISS Enterprise managed to escape to the Prime Universe. Which feels odd because Georgiou had an ENTIRE plot around having to leave, due to some universe sync issues.

The puzzle chain is following through the path of these Romulan Scientists in search of Progenitors Technology. The Progenitors were in an episode of TNG where the crew, along with some others, discovered this species called The Progenitors, whom had essentially created all life in the universe. It was partly used as an explanation as to why all the aliens look “more or less like humans.”

There is also a nod towards Deep Space Nine with the Breen being the main antagonists.

I kind of wish they had brought back and explained what happened with the Klingons. Even just maybe putting one of the puzzle steps on a Klingon planet would have been nice. Actually, a fun idea may have been to revisit the Time Crystal planet, and basically, because time is wonky there, they have to kill time and wait for the clue to be deposited first.

Now I am just making up fan fiction.

The Breen plotline is just, kind of weak. Some sort of Breen Prince or something falls in love with a human girl, who just happens to have connections to Book. The Breen Prince kills some Breen and now they are hunting him down as a traitor, so the Breen dude wants the Progenitor tech to trade for his life.

But then he dies, and the Breen just sort of, decide to follow his human girlfriend. I think maybe she was his wife by that point.

Anyway, Burnham managed to solve the puzzle of course and gets the opportunity to turn down becoming a literal God level Mary Sue.

But not before we get the most ridiculous Spore Drive moment in all of the series. Oh the Spore Drive. The magic mushrooms that can always save the day. The Breen have this massive ship, and the Discovery needs to stop it, and apparently, despite never coming up once before, the ship can suddenly separate off the saucer section. And they do this sort of, Spore Drive Magic, using the two halves, to transport the giant ship away. It’s neat to watch, I guess, but it kind of breaks an already broken magic plot device in an annoying way.

Speaking of random out of the blue never mentioned plot device. Saru is doing some side plot stuff involving the Breen, and he needs to get somewhere fast, and the Federation suddenly has this thing called the Pathway Drive. It’s never explained or anything, but it’s basically just “The writers hate that Warp Travel is slow”, much like the Spore Drive.

Another thing that I mostly just want to gripe about, the Progenitor puzzle “make the shape out of the one between the many” really, REALLY felt like it was trying to hard to echo “The Needs of the Many” line.

Also, why don’t shuttles get cute names anymore. It’s just “Disco

Star Trek Discovery – Season 4

As expected, despite there technically being ways, the crew is just staying in the Future’s Future. This season has been kind of meh overall, it really really feels like a rehash of the last two seasons except now Space Elon is the bad guy.

Also, are the actors getting bored with the show? Or maybe just, COVID messed up everyone’s schedules? It feels like a lot of the lesser characters started leaving near the end of the season. At least, the ones they didn’t give some characterization to. Last season they sort of gave Detmer a few bits of actual characterization beyond “pilot”. This season’s spare characterization cycles seem to be going to Owosekun. The other “person who sits up front.”

And of course, Tilly left, (she comes back). It really feels like they got rid of Tilly as Stamits’ engineering buddy and replaced her with Adria. More specifically, they took everything interesting about Tilly and put it in Adria, and everything kind of annoying about Tilly, and put it in Gray Tal. And neither half works as well when it’s split. Tilly is the Gestalt.

Speaking of Adira and Gray, they had a sort of, subplot going on early in the season, that stemmed from the weird Holo version of Gray. I am glad it ended fairly early on, with Gray leaving for Trill. I feel bad, but I found Gray to be incredibly annoying as a character. Way way too chipper, he made Adria’s character extremely wishy-washy and worse from her previous time, and he wasn’t ever actually part of the crew, which made him doing crew things (rarely) weird.

Not to mention the whole, “Lets synthesize you a body so you can be a real boy and extract your Trill consciousness,” kind of feels like it’s really screwing with Trill Lore.

It feels like they wanted to make Wesley seem less annoying by comparison. I suspect he will show up again more, and that’s fine, I just kind of hated him as a “regular.” And after his departure, Adira already feels more like their old self a bit more. Which is great.

The core plot arc for the season involves this giant black hole anomaly thing that sort of, showed up out of nowhere and started gobbling up planets. But it’s “random and unpredictable”. Eventually Space Elon (Tarka) shows up to be smug and annoying and screw things up for his own gain.

The black hole eats Book’s planet which kind of turns him into a huge emotional mess because we just got to meet his family (how convenient) who were of course, on the planet. This all leads to a lot of discussion a d politicking by the Federation leaders. It’s kind of crazy how suddenly the Federation is this whole thing again after being in literal shambles even BEFORE the Burn happened. Anyway, Burnham wants to negotiate with whomever is controlling the wormhole.and Space Elon wants to nuke it. The Federation decides to vote on whether or not nuking black holes is a good idea or not and decide that no, it’s not, that’s a stupid idea.

Not one to take no for an answer, he convinced Book to sneak away on their own to blow it up anyway. They also steal a prototype new Spore Drive, to put in Book’s ship, because the writers realized how impossible the story would be with regular Warp.

There is some chasing for a while and relationship drama because Burnham isn’t real happy about Book going against her and trying to nuke a black hole. Eventually, Discovery stops them, but Tarka manages to pull off his plan anyway.

This literally amounts to nothing.

They blow up the core. The thing goes away, then it just, come back. Like less than a minute later.

But a long the way we learned that the source is coming from our beyond the Great Barrier. We went to the Future’s Future, now it’s time to go to Outer Outer Space. Also Book and Tarka escape away, and we learn some backstory that is supposed to make Space Elon sympathetic but mostly just makes us wonder if he was gay for that alien dude or if they were just “roommates”.

It’s never stated. Potentially killing billions of people for a “roommate” feels a little extreme though.

So Discovery, because it’s the only ship that can do anything, Spore Jumps to the edge of the galaxy, because apparently, the Spore Drive doesn’t work outside of “the known universe”. Somewhere a sleeping Chief Engineer had to wake Up and tell Jett Reno to clean the dust off the warp core, because they were stuck using traditional warp for a while.

After passing into Outer Outer Space, Discovery encounters a giant shielded egg thing belonging to the unknown aliens. They make a detour to a nearby planet and find some long dead original civilization of these aliens. The President of the Federation also shows that she doesn’t know anything about how the Federation operates here too, because she protests that Burnham should not be beaming down to the planet. It’s like she doesn’t understand that even.on a ship with hundreds of crew members, only the senior officers and Captain ever get to actually leave the ship.

On the away mission, they discover that the aliens communicate through emotions. My first thought was, too bad they don’t have a Betazoid on board, but then I remembered that Book is also an Empath. Seems like the logical plot run, but nope, they don’t go that route.

Instead they use some sciencey stuff to work out the emotion language.

I want to touch on an issue with Discovery here. It’s become increasingly annoying, and by the end of the series, it’s bad enough that it’s literally used for jokes in the finale. They really really really gloss over the science parts. Like, all Trek science is kind of techno babble.mumbonjumbo, but it’s somewhat consistent and at least pays lip service to making sense in world.

Science in Discovery feels like the writers took a bunch of Trek science terms, put them in a tumbler, and started pulling them out randomly.

It’s like when CSI talks about “Port Forwarding the dev shell antivirus driver over the RAM chip interface”, but with Trek terms. It’s all words that mean something, but it’s output as gibberish.

Anyway, they work it out and start negotiations with the aliens. And they have to because suddenly both Vulcan (Sorry, N’Varr) and Earth are being threatened by the black hole thing now. Which feels weird because those two planets feel like they aren’t close enough to be threatened, but then it’s the Michael Burnham Show, and those are both her home planets, so, WE GOTTA UP THOSE STAKES FOR HER!

Burnham, Saru, and the various Federation emissaries on board, all beam down to start negotiations.

Also Book and Tarka also came to join the party, in secret, and somehow they don’t have nearly as much trouble getting around and through the barrier as Discovery did. Tarka, still hell bent on ….

Fuck it, it’s actually not clear WHAT Tarka is even doing.

He was a prisoner, he met a smart alien he may or may not have been in love with, he escaped the prison, but his friend didn’t, but he seems to think his friend escaped to another dimension. The pair had been working on a dimension-jumping project while in prison. Anyway, Tarka needs the power source the aliens use to power the dimension thing, but he also wants to blow it up, for, some reason.

It’s all very, kind of dumb.

Anyway, Tarka threatens the aliens, which freaks them out but then Discovery proves themselves to be true by stopping Tarka.

This also involves several moments of “This character is going to sacrifice themselves or die” that never happen because, Transporters exist and we can’t kill off characters anymore, I guess.

Overall the season felt kind of weak, and the show is starting to fall deep into iffy territory. I’ll probably go on about a lot of this for the Season 5 write up, or if it gets long, it will just be its own post.

Star Trek Discovery – Season 3

So, how to solve the problem of “Discovery feels too advanced” and solve the problem of, “The writers want to make Star Trek but mostly ignore most established Trek canon concepts.”

What if you just… Catapult the plot 930 years into the future.

I am not entirely against the time travel angle of the plot.

I am a bit against the “930 years” part.

For one, now there is the opposite problem, where everything doesn’t feel advanced ENOUGH. Like seriously, did society just plateau? This is literally the equivalent of being a medieval knight to our present day. Even if English were the primary language, there would be a communications barrier. And in general, the tech feels like it has not changed much, like it should. The Spore Drive should be long past useless in favor of some sort of folded space transwarp nonsense.

Granted, there is the main plot problem of “The Burn”. Which vaguely explains why everything is not as advanced as it could be. But also, why were they still on Dilithium 800 some years in the future?

So, let’s dig a bit more into the details here.

The first episode follows Burnham alone, who emerges alone, in her special time suit. She runs into a courier named Book, who has a cat named Grudge, who is the best character introduced for Season 3, as infrequently as she appears. Also, Book is like, 1000x better than fucking Ash Tyler, while he essentially is replacing.

Discovery and the screw shows up in the second episode. One year after Burnham arrived. Time shenanigans. During that year Burnham has basically shrugged off all of her logical Vulcan ways and loosened up quite a bit. A lot of underlying theme for Burnham and the crew this season is, “find your place.” Everyone has been uprooted from everything they know. Also during all of this, we learn a bit about “The Burn”. Basically, roughly 100 years prior, an event happened which screwed up all of the Dilithium in the galaxy, which caused a lot of ships to self destruct all at once, and effectively ended warp travel.

Warp is still possible, but Dilithium is scarce enough that it’s much less laissez-faire than it once was. Burnham, for example, has not returned to Earth during that year, because she did not have the fuel to make the trip.

Book tags along with Discovery, and they Spore Jump to Earth, to rejoin the Federation. Which seems really crazy, like they could just show up 1000 years later and just, continue on doing Federation things. The arrival on Earth leads to one of, in my opinion, the most interesting parts of this whole “Future” experience. Earth, is not part of the Federation, which itself is barely a thing anymore. The entire Earth episode is basically like any other, “visit a random alien world and solve a problem” episodes that Trek is known for. Which is kind of a fun and neat twist.

The trip does lead them to someone who knows where the Federation is, a young woman named Adira who has been bonded with a Trill Symbiote, and is the first of their kind. It was done as an emergency when their boyfriend, Gray Tal, a Trill who had recently become a host, was injured and needed emergency treatment.

They also ask to use they/them pronouns. Which is actually kind of clever of the writers, because it gives them a way use the “present day” pronouns topic, but also, being a Trill, with memories of several lifetimes, they basically ARE a they. The Human/Trill angle also kind of feels like an excuse to downplay the Trill’s ability to access old experiences and memory, because Adira doesn’t come off much like say, Dax, who was super buddy buddy with Cisco due to her previous experiences as Kirzon Dax. Beyond recalling the location of the Federation HQ, it doesn’t show up much.

In general, Adira feels like an alright addition, though like everyone on Discovery, they are a bit of a know it all in their field.

Eventually, Discovery does meet up with the Federation remnants, who are, less than receptive, which is to be expected. Especially since Spock went and basically wiped out Discovery from history. They do eventually prove themselves, but even then, the Federation now, isn’t exactly the same Federation that dominated the galaxy on a mission of exploration. They are essentially just survivors.

The new Admiral isn’t super keen on sharing information about The Burn either, which at this point the crew still doesn’t actually know what it was.

There is also mention that time travel has been outlawed after some sort of Temporal Wars that happened during the 930 year time jump. I suppose that had to be done because at the end of the day, Time Travel is pretty common in Star Trek. The crew got Discovery away from Control, but they seem iffy on the time travel now that they are there. There really isn’t any reason they couldn’t do some sort of slingshot maneuver like in Star Trek IV, to return home, even if it was in another ship, to keep Discovery away from Control.

Though Control was killed by Georgiou. They could just, take Discovery back.

So we get some more running around the galaxy, learning more about an Orion/Andorian alliance called The Emerald Chain, who are essentially the main antagonists of the season. We also learn that Romans and Vulcans have sort of, rejoined as a species and now call themselves the Ni’var.

There is also a notable little interlude that allows Emperor Georgiou to leave the show. This felt, really abrupt honestly. I was kind of iffy on the idea of bringing her back via the Mirror Universe, especially since she was kind of playing the role of Space Hitler over there. But it worked out and was interesting. Also, Michelle Yeoh seemed to be having a good time in the role, or maybe she is just a good actress. But there was a small build up and then, “She is unstable in our universe so we have to send her back.” But not just back, they seemed to send her back in time or something as well, with the most random cameo, the Guardian of Forever from the GOS episode, City on the Edge of Forever.

It’s random because this “character” is literally a giant talking rock gate.

The send off was both good and bad though. Basically, Georgiou relives the moment that she was betrayed by Lorca and Mirror Burnham in the Mirror Universe. No cameo from Jason Isaacs annoyingly. It was an interesting story to tell, but I have a really hard time giving a shit about hallucinated alternate universe versions of characters. There is basically no stakes of anyone dies, which they do.

Anyway, I figure they also partly wrote her out of the show because Book kind of fills the role of “Outsider loose canon”, but he does so in a less OP way. Georgiou is extremely capable in almost every aspect, which made her a bit too useful as a Deus Ex tool to wrap up problems. She would have seen though everyone else’s bull shit in a lot of the later plots.

As Burnham tries to piece together what caused The Burn (because somehow science of 930 years in the future is garbage???), the crew of Discovery is lead to a mysterious Nebula. Inside they find a planet made of Dilithium, and on that planet a crashed ship, with a lone survivor, a Kelpian whom has been living there alone for 100 some years, since he was a young boy. He was born on this planet after the crash,and his mother left him inside an elaborate holo simulation to keep him alive and keep him company.

The Holo thing is… Weird. It’s an interesting concept at its core. But for not really explained reasons, when the Discovery Crew beams down, they are overlayed by the Holo system to look like random other races. Also, for some reason it makes Adira’s boyfriend corporeal. There has been a sort of subplot where he was showing up only to them. It kind of felt like just, a way to represent the Trill consciousness in a new way. Only Adira could see Gray. But suddenly, Gray is visible to everyone inside the hologram area. It was kind of weird.

They don’t really seem to gain any of those race’s traits. Like, Burnham, is a Trill, but she doesn’t suddenly have a hologram symbiote. It felt mostly like an excuse for Saru to be there, but not appear as a Kelpian (Saru shows as human). Due to the interference of the Dilithium and Holo program, they have to convince the stranded Kelpian to shut the system down first. There is also a timer of sorts from Dilithium poisoning.

Which is complicated because The Emerald Chain shows up and takes over Discovery, stranding half our important crew. The Emerald Chain tries to use Discovery to take out Star Fleet HQ, which goes badly because the Discovery Crew are resilient and spunky and can’t fail! The Spore Drive saves the day and they convince the Kelpian to shut things down so they can leave the planet.

There is also this rediculous fight on a turbo lift inside the shit. Of all the “Un-Trek” things in this series, the ship designs annoy me the most. The old Treks were not perfect, but they were pretty good about making ship sizes and layouts believable. In Discovery’s case, we kind of have an idea of how large it is from last season, when they evacuated the crew to The Enterprise before the final Control fight. There were these physical catwalks used, and we saw people in those catwalks so we know they are like, 10-15 feet tall, so you can get an rough estimate of the height and general size of these ships. As I have mentioned in a previous write up, the internals of Discovery seem to be completely filled with these huge open chasms of space. Not to mention the disks of the Saucer Section spin when using the Spore Drive.

WHERE IS ALL THIS SPACE??

Maybe it’s just a small hole int he middle right? Except the climax of this episode has this pretty drawn out hand to hand fight between Book and one of the bad guy leaders (whose name I forget), in an open Turbo Lift as is screams through the ship. At the speed it’s going, and the time fo the fight, it would imply the ship is literally miles long. The ship really isn’t that big. It might, MIGHT, if you really stretch, be a single mile long.

Why do they need him to leave so badly? Apparently, he has developed some sort of weird symbiotic relationship with Dilithium. And when his mother died, in his grief, he caused The Burn.

Feels a bit anti climactic, but it’s kind of an alright and less expected angle. Getting him off the Dilithium planet stops a second Burn.