Splitting into two posts because I hit the 20000 character count.
lazzer grardaion?, May 27, 2022, 06:10:07 pm
In the third season, time travel shenanigans send the Discovery to the 32nd century, where a cataclysmic event called ‘the Burn’ made dilithium (the technobabble substance that makes the warp drive work) all over the galaxy (universe? multiverse?) stop ‘working’, and now warp travel is really hard, and the galaxy is in chaos.
The cause of the Burn is the big season-long mystery. Was it a secret Vulcan science experiment that they’re trying to cover up? Was it some ultra-powerful cosmic entity like ‘Q’?
The explanation they ultimately give is that a Kelpien child on a radioactive planet made out of dilithium somehow mutated to become ‘connected to’ the dilithium, and he got so scared and sad at seeing his mother die that he made a big psychic shockwave that burned out all the dilithium.
First, I want to say that this, by itself, would not be the hokiest sci-fi concept that Star Trek has ever done. There have been plenty of episodes about immature beings with immense powers, like S1E2 of original Star Trek! It’s been there since the beginning.
My first problem is that it’s not a satisfying resolution to a season-long mystery. It could be a good premise for a standalone episode, but “the heretofore unknown psychic child did it” is one step below “god/gods did it” and two steps below “the butler did it”.
Second, I wouldn’t complain so much if, in some way, it tied back into other themes or ideas, but Discovery isn’t interested in exploring themes or ideas. It’s interested in a big *twist*, and then there’s some okay character stuff with Saru, but the writers clearly have no interest in anything beyond that.
Here’s my minimal script doctor. Rather than the Burn being a complete mystery that nobody has an explanation for, it’s something that *everybody* has an explanation for. It’s an era of paranoia and finger-pointing. Everybody, even the nominally peaceful future Federation, is hankering for revenge and violence against whoever caused the Burn. Then, if the cause of the Burn turns out to be a child who can’t control their own powers, it forces everybody to confront their own desire to punish those ‘responsible’ for something that turns out to be an accident. That could be an Idea.
———
Maybe the biggest dropped ball is the first: the ship 'Discovery' has a ‘spore drive’ that lets it travel anywhere in the universe instantly. No warp drive, no weeks or months of travel, it can teleport anywhere.
The Discovery has the greatest ability to explore of any ship ever shown in Star Trek. They can go anywhere! They could end up in a part of the galaxy that’s never been explored before! They can really truly go where no one has gone before!
And then… they never really take advantage of that. There are the places they need to go to move the plot along, but they never just… explore.
There’s just not much of a ‘Trek’ in this Star Trek, and I think that’s a shame.
———
This lack of imagination, and absence of any overarching Ideas, means that sometimes, Discovery is just an absolute mess of a show.
S3E5 of Discovery starts off with the Discovery crew meeting the 32nd century Federation, and (as is so often the case in Star Trek), the admiral in charge is kind of a dick! He wants to split up the Discovery crew and put them on other assignments, and for a bit you think the episode is going to be about that.
Then it turns out that there’s a plague somewhere, and the Discovery is the only ship (due to its spore drive) that can get there in time to deliver medical supplies, and you think the episode is going to be about that.
But then it turns out that the cure for the plague is in some seeds on a seed-bank ship, and they have to go there, and there’s a weird guy who has his dead wife and daughter in stasis pods, and the guy keeps phasing in and out of reality because of a transporter accident during an ion storm, and it’s kinda about that for a while.
It’s just an absolute mess, and even though that’s one of the worse examples, you can pick episodes from each season of Disco that are just as much scrambled thoughtless nonsense, that manages to do or say nothing of substance in a 45-minute runtime. Sure, every season of every Star Trek series has a few clunkers, but even the bad Season 1 TNG episodes have An Idea or two in them, and the ideas guide the story, even if it’s hamfisted or sloppy or trite.
The ideas of Star Trek are its skeleton, and I think it’s quite a good skeleton to build on, in spite of the mixed results that various writers and directors have had over the years. Star Trek is a show about how human beings in the future might understand and respect each other, work together, and learn more about themselves by learning about those different from us.
Discovery and Picard have no interest in or connection to those ideas, and so you’re left with a sort of floppy blob-like sack of passionate speeches about nothing, quippy ‘smart’ dialogue, and some occasionally good special effects.
———
There are plenty of good actors in Disco, and a few good characters in there, too, but let’s take a quick detour in that direction.
Discovery has a lot of ‘bench-warmers’ in its core cast. Sure, in any Star Trek you have random crew members who are just sort of hanging out in the background, people who defend Discovery online like to bring up how Lieutenants Uhura and Sulu didn’t have first names in original Star Trek, *BUT* other Star Trek very rarely pretends like those crew members are real characters that we know anything about.
In Discovery’s Season 2 finale, Captain Pike gives a big emotional speech:
“Lieutenants Detmer and Owosekun, I wouldn't be here if you hadn't saved my life on the way to that asteroid. Lieutenant Nilsson, You've stepped up for Airiam in way that honors her. Lieutenants Bryce and Rhys, you're calm under pressure”
Lieutenant Detmer’s only notable characteristic is that she has a robot eye, and (after this speech happens) she gets PTSD after crashing the ship, and that gets handled mostly off-screen. Even in her tearful message (part of a montage) that she leaves behind for her friends and family before disappearing to the future, the only thing we see her talk about is how hard it was when she got injured and had to get a robot eye.
Lieutenant Owosekun’s Memory-Alpha page has a lot of “Owosekun was present at” in it. There’s one season 4 episode where she turns out to be a skilled pit fighter? But at the point Pike is giving this speech, I don’t even think we know her first name! People complain about Uhura being underdeveloped, and not having a first name, but Star Trek was also a show written and produced in the 1960s. A show written in the 2010s should aspire to being better than that; either it should develop the character enough that we understand and care about them, or it should cut out all the vapid inspirational speeches that would only have meaning if they had done that legwork beforehand.
Nilsson, Bryce, and Rhys are such nothing characters I can’t identify which is which by name.
Airiam is a robot lady. The writers didn’t know or care what kind of robot lady, some of the writers thought she was an alien, and she only got any kind of characterization or backstory the episode before she was killed off.
Expanding on the personalities of the background characters is a good thing. It provides texture to the show and its setting that makes it feel more real. TNG had a great episode ‘Lower Decks’ (the namesake of the new cartoon show), about cadets and ensigns and the guy who serves drinks at Ten-Forward, and what they do in their day-to-day life.
Fleshing out those background characters can make the stakes of the show feel more real, but we can’t just be *told* to care about a character. When Red-Shirt Crewman Number 6 gets eaten by a lava monster at the start of the episode, it demonstrates that the situation is serious and dangerous, but you probably don’t know very much about them, and the rest of the episode probably won’t explore them in any serious depth. In the cases where it does (again, like in ‘Lower Decks’) that death is a focal point of the episode. It ties into the show’s themes and ideas about the responsibilities of command, or the danger of exploring the unknown, or *something*, *anything*.
Discovery likes to take the roles that would usually be random redshirts in any other Star Trek show, and gesture to these character-shaped-objects as if we know anything about or care about them. No shade to anybody who likes them, I enjoy character-shaped-objects in my shows as much as the next person (MORN FOREVER), but I do not think for a second that Deep Space 9 would work as a show if you replaced most of the main characters with Morns who do nothing but deliver expository technobabble, and you occasionally hear about something neat they did offscreen.
———
Recently, Kurtzmann/Goldsman started a ‘new show’, subtitled ‘Strange New Worlds’. Some of the trailers looked promising! It promised a return to episodic storytelling with self-contained episodes about a problem or dilemma or whatever that the characters have to solve. After Discovery and Picard, I treated it as a ‘fool me once, shame on you’ situation, but I resolved to give it one episode to sell me on it.
Now, the Disco Defenders may argue that one episode is not a fair metric to judge the quality of a ‘new show’. However, the creative team is still headed by the same people, you have returning characters Pike and Spock in your core cast, still played by the same actors as in Discovery, and following through with storylines that were set up in Discovery (namely, that Pike touched a crystal that showed him the future, so he knows his face is going to melt from delta radiation at some point, and being sad about that is his main character beat).
‘Strange New Worlds’ is basically Discovery Season 5, but I agreed to one episode.
The first episode starts with a long voiceover monologue that basically says “first contact with aliens is the realm of science fiction, until it isn’t”. Extended flowery monologues saying very little struck me as a bad sign.
Then, you have Pike watching ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, specifically Klaatu’s monologue about how humans should take care of each other, and end war and exploitation. Very on-the-nose, also lazy to put a speech from a classic science fiction movie and act like you can just gesture to that rather than making a point yourself.
Imagining the art of the future is a difficult writing task, and one that Star Trek usually punts on, but this is… weak. (As an aside, it opens up the confusing question of what other classic science fiction exists in the world of Star Trek. If ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ exists, does the 2008 remake exist? What other sci-fi movies exist? So much genre fiction borrows from Star Trek in one way or another, does Star Trek necessarily exist in the world of Star Trek, or is there just this weird cultural gap?)
Then, true to its promise, the story has a problem that is introduced and resolved in the same episode.
Pike is called to duty, in spite of his reluctance (because he is sad about knowing his face is going to melt at some point) to salvage a first-contact scenario gone wrong. Normally, the Federation only contacts civilizations after they’ve invented warp technology, out of a recognition that alien contact can be disastrous for a civilization that hasn’t yet advanced to that point. Developing warp technology is the ‘graduation’ of a species, that puts it on the same footing as the rest of the galactic community they are now joining. This policy is the Federation’s ‘Prime Directive’ that is the focal point of so many interesting Star Trek episodes.
It turns out that the species that they *thought* had developed a warp drive has actually developed a ‘warp bomb’, which is never explored or explained in any detail beyond the name.
Apparently they developed the warp bomb after seeing the big space battle at the end of Discovery Season 2, which is a bit like a group of uncontacted peoples developing a nuclear bomb after watching a naval battle between nuclear-powered ships.
To blend in on the planet’s surface, Pike, Spock, and Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh (extremely subtle) receive an injection that temporarily rewrites their DNA so they look like the aliens. This is a spin on an established Star Trek idea, that people will undergo plastic surgery to blend in with alien societies to discreetly study them, except that this is a disguise that can randomly wear off at inopportune times to create conflict and move the plot forward.
On the alien planet that developed the warp bomb, there are people holding signs and protesting, and monitors everywhere displaying news of riots and violence. Spock goes “gosh, we seem to have landed on a planet in the midst of civil unrest”, because the writers think the audience is very very stupid.
Spock knocks out a couple of scientists and takes their scientist uniforms so they can sneak into the warp bomb facility, and then they transport the scientists up to the Enterprise, and try to keep them sedated, rather than leaving them in a field somewhere, or outside a bar, or anywhere, on the massive planet below them. Of course, the sedative wears off and there’s a scene of wacky hijinks where one of the scientists runs around the ship in a panic, until he gets stuck in an elevator with Uhura, where they talk about sports (???) until he gets off the elevator and nurse Chapel sticks him with more sedative.
Pike, Spock, and La’an sneak into the warp bomb facility, and of course the DNA-rewriting serum wears off at an inopportune time and they get captured.
As a captured alien, Pike gets an audience with the president of the planet, and he basically says “my planet, which was at one point exactly like your planet is now, did WWIII, and it was very bad, I recommend not building bombs and blowing each other up”. The president goes “we’re the ones in control on this planet, we have the most power, we make the rules”, and rather than try to debate that philosophy of power, or highlight what has happened to other civilizations and cultures that thought that way, Pike goes “well, I have the most power” and uses the Enterprise to force these aliens to get along with each other, and that’s pretty much the episode.
It spends so little time thinking about the alien planet, and their society, and how it got the way it is. We learn absolutely nothing about the dissidents who are opposing the existing government, or why, it just assumes that this alien planet is literally identical to 21st century United States society right now in every single way, so they don't need to explain anything, and then it has nothing substantial to say except "Don't do a civil war! WWIII is bad!”
Honestly, even a bad Season 1 TNG episode has more to say about our world, and the different cultures, and philosophies, and ideologies in it, than this episode.
It has no ideas that it wants to explore, and it has no imagination about how alien cultures might develop. Pike’s character 'arc' in the episode is that he’s sad about his face melting, then he talks about WWIII being bad and how ‘life has possibilities’, and then he’s less sad about his face melting. It’s not an arc, it’s two points with a monologue in the middle.
That’s not even touching on La’an’s (god, how do you do a possessive “s” with that name?) awful backstory about being all her friends and family getting captured by the Gorn and being murdered and eaten and having their bodies cut open for Gorn ‘breeding sacks’ and her being the only survivor. UGH! AWFUL!
The show has no new ideas, no previously-unseen reserves of imagination, no skillful explorations of characters. It’s nothing!
I gave it my one episode. I’m done.
———
By all means, if you found something in any of these shows, I’m happy for you, and I would love to hear about what you found interesting or inspiring or meaningful, but I don’t think modern Star Trek (at least the live action shows) hold anything for me any more.
The guys over at RedLetterMedia (whom I agree with on many, but certainly not all Trek-related topics) described the ‘Picard’ show as ‘being broken up with by Star Trek’, and as silly as that sounds, it does kind of describe my feelings.
Star Trek was something very important to me, but Star Trek today has changed into something different, and I don’t think we have anything to offer each other anymore. Science fiction without Ideas is just flashy lights and technobabble, and that’s exactly what Kurtzmann and Goldsman are serving up.
There is still plenty of good high-concept sci-fi television out there. I would like to draw attention to ‘Raised By Wolves’ as a show that is just packed to the gills with Big Ideas about religion, parenthood, the unknown, life and death and creation and the universe and everything, and which thoughtfully weaves those ideas into stories that center around a richly realized cast of characters and their motivations. Also, shockingly enough, I loved the new 'Halo' series, which also explores themes of religion, parenthood, the morality of war, emotion and identity, and ties those themes into its characters and plot.
The words ‘Star Trek’ are just a brand name, but even though there is good thoughtful sci-fi out there, I’m sad and disappointed that Star Trek, which was my first exposure to so many of those big sci-fi ideas, is no longer interested in those ideas. I don’t think any child out there is going to have their mind blown by something they see in Discovery, Picard, or SNW. I don’t think there’s anything that will stick with them long-term (at least in a good way, it is entirely possible that there may be a child out there who will remember the scary tar monster).