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Questions for Discovery Fans
theboxisred
Member Posts: 477 Arc User
in Ten Forward
Star Trek: Discovery has been cancelled.
From the beginning of this show there have been those that issued criticisms, both legitimate and otherwise, and those that vehemently defended every criticism. Many of these defenders are forum regulars and it is to those that I pose the following questions:
Why have you not started a thread lamenting Discovery's cancellation?
I ask because there was a recent discussion regarding the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005 and I would have thought that Discovery would rate at least that much interest as it was cancelled.
Was there some point or element in the show that just dampened your interest?
Did you come to realize that certain criticisms had merit and you could no longer ignore it?
Did your interest slowly fade until it simply no longer mattered if you missed it?
Are you a sincere fan and the weight of the cancellation just hasn't hit you yet?
This isn't a discussion looking to start a fight or to elicit a "Gotcha."
Those looking for such things please look elsewhere.
I'm sincerely curious as to your experience and thoughts about this.
Thanks.
Non-Sequitur:
Oh, yes, there will be typos...
From the beginning of this show there have been those that issued criticisms, both legitimate and otherwise, and those that vehemently defended every criticism. Many of these defenders are forum regulars and it is to those that I pose the following questions:
Why have you not started a thread lamenting Discovery's cancellation?
I ask because there was a recent discussion regarding the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise in 2005 and I would have thought that Discovery would rate at least that much interest as it was cancelled.
Was there some point or element in the show that just dampened your interest?
Did you come to realize that certain criticisms had merit and you could no longer ignore it?
Did your interest slowly fade until it simply no longer mattered if you missed it?
Are you a sincere fan and the weight of the cancellation just hasn't hit you yet?
This isn't a discussion looking to start a fight or to elicit a "Gotcha."
Those looking for such things please look elsewhere.
I'm sincerely curious as to your experience and thoughts about this.
Thanks.
Non-Sequitur:
Oh, yes, there will be typos...
0
Comments
The show had a lot of unrealized potential and I often watch shows like that hoping that potential is eventually realized, but with DSC the network never let it find its stride before panicking and going into another round of damage-control mode, often including purging and replacing large swaths of the back-end production people. That made the whole series seem rather hesitant and shallow, like the creative people were tiptoeing around a minefield afraid to take any bold steps not passed down with a heavy hand from above that could explode in their faces.
Probably the worst plot mistake was the jump to the future, it was meant to free the writers from the constraints of being a prequel, but they jumped so far that it severed too many ties and became isolated and irrelevant from a nostalgia viewpoint (along with eliminating much of the character potential they had in the original setting), which, as one would imagine, is a serious mistake in what is essentially a nostalgia show.
To top it off, the network never made a secret of the fact that the show was only meant to hold on for five years or so while they spun up new spinoffs catering to different demographics, so it is hardly a surprise that the fifth season is its last. Another thing they made no secret of was the fact that it was an experiment in trying to bring action movies to the small screen as a series, and few experiments like that last very long, usually looked back on later as "too far ahead of their times".
The cast itself was excellent for the most part, and the characters were generally interesting, but they never really did much of anything with them (in first season they didn't even refer to many of them by name for instance, much less do anything with their backgrounds). As I said above, the writing tended to be shallow and abrupt and the dialog was usually truly b-grade movie levels of execrable, to the point where the actors often were obviously struggling to perform the lines in a way that made them seem less poorly written.
Overall, to me it was watchable but with an erratic kind of a knife edge balance between actually good and embarrassingly stupid elements without having anywhere near the draw of TOS (I wrote a lot of letters in both of the campaigns to keep TOS on the air for instance) and the traditional Trek spinoffs.
I feel, however, that five seasons was about the best length of run for the show, and trying to get another season or two out of the same premise would be pushing things a bit. (Remember season 7 of TNG?) Instead, I'm hoping for good things from the Starfleet Academy spinoff, which in my opinion has a lot more room to stretch.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Thanks for your input!
I admit I wasn't a fan of the season 1 Klingon look. But it did improve in season 2 by smoothing out the features a bit and giving them hair. Jumping to the 32nd Century helped explain why we never heard of Spore Drive tech as well, and opened the door to a new time period that had NEVER been touched before. The latest we ever saw was 29th Century with the USS Relativity.
And honestly, Discovery did kinda follow the same path as other Trek shows had in the past. Took a season or two to find its footing. Could Discovery have gone another season or two? Entirely possible.
And honestly... Discovery did open the door for people who preferred season long story arcs. And Discovery gave us Strange New Worlds.
So for all the flak Discovery has taken for being different, we gotta look at everything else it gave us. Anson Mount as Captain Pike, an amazing reimagining of the original Enterprise that would lead to its own spinoff series, and expanding the lore of the universe we all know and love. Were there a few speedbumps along the way? Yes. But I'd say every series had their ups and downs.
The reason Hollywood got into the whole five year run thing in the first place was a balance between having enough episodes for syndication (which streaming makes irrelevant) and the way that contracts for a new show are standardized at five years, and the five-year renegotiation always increases salaries and related expenses which usually means the rest of the show's budget takes a big hit (which in this case probably means less of an eyecandy and action-hero SFX budget) so the shows often have to rely on better writing to save money.
Similarly, the pedestal stuff gets really old really fast, how often can the heroes be essentially "the only ones who can save the universe!!!" and hope to keep any kind of credibility story wise? They went to that well too often, and in that respect they would not have been able to keep going beyond the five-year ending even with its slightly more than miniseries season format.
On the other hand, the characters had enough interest potential to keep going for sure, at only 65 episodes they hardly had time to scratch the surface on a few of the characters (including the main character, Burnham) and almost nothing was done with the rest.
Similarly, they could not have run out of plots, they only did seven during the entire five season run (three semi-connected arcs in first season, and one in each of the others), as I said earlier it seems to be more of a case of they were afraid of doing anything that might kick off another storm of fan complaints and trigger another purge.
Personally, I think that when they decided to do that far time jump, they should have embraced the Andromeda-style setting and really have to work hard to reestablish the Federation ideals instead of the gee-wiz tech drop and semi-cakewalk with the thumb-twiddling Federation underground stuff they ended up doing. The isolation and pressure of a more first-season- Andromeda-like situation would have done wonders for the almost nonexistent character interactions and development problem seen in the show as aired.
The writers could have even left themselves a backdoor into the SNW setting by way of a timeline reset that avoids the Control problem, which could even help fix some of the aesthetics and continuity problems between DSC and TOS by redressing some of the ship interior and uniforms to SNW standards. And the way you keep a secret like the spore drive isn't to "seal the records" and ignore it, it is by spreading disinformation about it having too many downsides to be worth pursuing (sort of like the Genisis Device aftermath), there is a lot of milage the writers could get out of that by having the Discovery crew and Enterprise command officers and the small circle of others in the know scrambling to keep the cat in the bag.
The aesthetic problems mainly came from Moonves's instructions to use The Undiscovered Country as the base model aesthetically instead of trying to update TOS, along with some touches from the Kelvin movies like the picture window on the bridge. The result was rather boring and generic (the Shenzhou was actually a little more interesting than USS Discovery was), and had virtually no Star Trek feel to it aesthetically.
Looking at the corridors gives a good idea of how generic DSC aesthetics were:
This is a corridor in the Raza from Dark Matter (the show deliberately went for generic to convey the amnesiac crew's sense of familiar-yet-unfamiliar for their surroundings):
See how similar it is to a corridor from USS Discovery:
and how little it resembles a TNG corridor:
or a TOS corridor:
Roddenberry wanted a relatively clean, minimalist look for TOS with none of the utility tunnel/submarine look that was so prevalent in TV and movies of the time, which worked out rather well logistically since Desilu ended up making most of the ship set on speculation and the only materials they had on hand were regular drywall and wood framing from all their cop shows and contemporary comedies (NBC did pay for the changes they insisted on after they greenlit the show however). He was well familiar with the troubles the US navy was having with people trapped in submarines for just a few months, let alone years in space.
He said in conventions and interviews that if he had his way rooms like the break room and conference room would have holographic "windows" showing scenes of futuristic ground cities instead of just showing space in order to give the crew a break and letting the ground scenery allow them to decompress a bit, something that obviously never happened in TNG despite his supposed control of the show (that or he changed his mind by then).
In general DSC was not a bad show, it had a lot of potential especially if they took a more inclusive route instead of going out of their way to trample TOS the way they did in first season. And as I said above, if the academy show never makes it into production they could always use the time reset option and in essence come around full circle and become a spinoff of SNW, which would make for a nice "cinematic universe" pair that could complement each other.
Thanks for the input.
While SNW is monster of the week with the gorn threat backdrop, Disco could have been centered around helping to rebuild a shattered Federation, which, oddly enough, the show did, just in the wrong time.
Even with Future jump, the plot error i despise was the burn, and the cause
Thanks, again, for the input!
I'm tired of "Thanks for the input," so thanks for adding to the discussion.