Was the show doing well at all? I appreciate that I might just be in my own little bubble, but I don’t know a single person that loves this show. Some people like it, but it’s always a milquetoast endorsement, like “It’s not bad” or “It seems like a good scifi series but it feels like Star Trek fan fiction”, etc.
I’m surprised they didn’t at least strongly suspect it was the end.
Especially when compared to Strange New Worlds, which is an, imo, amazing Star Trek series.
@Madison_rogue The show retconned itself out of existence. They shot a series finale scene each of the past two years. Felt like they were keeping it going until SNW hit its stride so they would still have a “prestige” Star Trek TV show for Paramount+ and that’s exactly what happened.
Really depends on the site, the time of year, and the specific topic. The Trek subreddit, for instance, tended to be pro-DSC when a season was airing and anti-DSC between seasons. Even here, that recent thread on the DSC Klingon redesign was very in favor of DSC.
I like it as well, yet I didn't find a place in Trek forums until I left Reddit last month. So this is new territory for me. Take it in stride, there are other Discovery fans out there.
I personally might have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been (seemingly) shoehorned into the Star Trek universe. I understand it’s not a very subjective metric, but Discovery just didn’t feel like Star Trek.
It comes across as if someone producer got pitched a sci-fi series with the plot of Discovery and thought, “This is great! It would be even better if we slapped Star Trek all over it!”
I bailed on DSC back when season 2 was airing. Specifically, Project Daedalus was my last episode. Later, I tried watching it again and trying to enjoy it more on its own merits, ignoring the Trek branding and whatnot. I wanted to bail again at the exact same point. I don’t know if it’s a too many cooks situation with the constant showrunner turnover or if the writers’ room just has an obsession with melodrama, but at no point did it feel, to me, like there was a good show hiding in there.
What I saw was ok from a plot perspective (for me). So the whole premise was nice and to me it fit into Star Trek. But as I just complained in another comment: I couldn’t cope with the amount of crying and the way they forced drama into the story.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off. Also the other officers. I should believe that these are the best of the Star Fleet, top of their class, trained for war but then they falter in the middle of a mission because their lover/friend/whatever gets hurt or dies? That just doesn’t fit.
Maybe I zoned that out from previous Star Trek (because it’s been a while …), but in my mind the characters there were a lot more stable and professional. They all had their individual quirks and mannerisms, but during missions they more or less got their shit together.
There are a lot of bad trek episodes scattered across every series. Bad episodes isn't the issue with Discovery. The issue is that, throughout all of trek, the crew has come together and stuck with each other through thick and thin. If there ever is inter-crew strife, it's solved in generally one or two episodes (except for major plot/story themes like the Maquis, or Seven being a Borg).
Discovery, on the other hand, is a show where the crew was constantly backstabbing, betraying, lying, and being all around bad towards each other. There was no finding solace among the crew in a world filled with strife -- the world was strife, and the crew was also strife. And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
It’s almost like those “filler” episodes in all the previous series actually had a function of allowing the series’ interpersonal relationships to gel and solidify. When everything is always an emergency and everyone must react RIGHT NOW OR ELSE it tends to wear people out. There’s nothing wrong with missions that just go somewhat routine and people get to interact with strange and interesting people from entirely different situations and places.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off
No, that part feels very, very on to me. Burnham was a human girl who was witness to family being brutally slaughtered (as far as she knew/could tell) who was then placed in the care of a Vulcan man who liked living as a sociology experiment. This is a person who is traumatized from a relatively young age, and who has no idea how to cope with her feelings. She's never received therapy, only more psychological abuse.
The issue I ended up having with the show is that the show itself never addresses this. It's actually pretty clearly the setup for the entire series, but no one ever acknowledges that Michael needs help, no one ever tries to get her any, and, in the end, she never gets the help she needs. They took what could and should have been a character arc about healing from abuse and just turned it into "SMG's pretty good at crying".
Once it became clear that the show had zero interest in examining its inciting premise, I lost all patience with it.
Greetings fellow DSC fan. I like the show, too. Considering that Paramount+ kept it going for 5 seasons, a lot of other people watched it. While I’m a fan of the show, I don’t think it’s perfect, and I can respect other folks critiques of the show. But sometimes the vitriol generators go so long and strong, it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise with DSC criticisms.
Y’know, if I had a nickel for every time Jonathan Frakes was involved in a Star Trek episode that unexpectedly became the series finale, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
From what I understand in television writing it was a constant struggle of “should we write a cliffhanger hoping it gets us renewed” to “we should have some closure in case we get cancelled”, since many writers had no idea what would happen.
ENT’s trip to 1944 between seasons 3 and 4. Or in other words what must be the writer’s “you made us make this temporal cold war cake and by koala we are gonna make you eat it” letter to the execs.
I don’t think we know of a case where it convinced a studio executive, but then again we know very little about the reasons why some shows get renewed and some don’t.
We do know cases where ending on a cliffhanger helped drumm up enough fan engagement to reverse a cancellation (timeless on nbc is a recent(ish) example for that)
There’s a lot of “emotionally” in that article. Kinda fits the series that was over-filled with emotional crap. (tbf, I aborted watching somewhere in Season 3, so maybe that changed afterwards. But I doubt it.)
yea, love it or hate it, Discovery did not really change its core vibe. I think I had hopes it would in season 3. Season 2 had already played with different vibes with Pike/Spock etc. And the idea for the premise of season 3 was so bold (and which I think is the best and most forward pushing premise of Trek since Next-Gen and DS9) that I figured something new was in stall. It seemed so at first … but then wasn’t really IMO.
Or that Seasons 3 and 4 and 5 were a terrifyingly large Holodeck Program run by Tom Paris to see what would happen if the U.S.S. Discovery arrived in the 32nd century and that the U.S.S. Discovery was teleported back to the times of the Iconians?
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