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by numberless 541 days ago
Star Trek: Discovery is... Something.

In my opinion, it's one of the worst (non canon now) Star Trek shows but it does get marginally better if you can struggle through the first season or two.

I would not recommend it unless you have nothing else to watch

5 comments

I dropped it about half-way through season 2. Even if you pretend it's not Star Trek and treat it as a stand-alone show, it's terrible. The characters are not likeable and there is no depth to the story. It seems like they just stuck together some bells and whistles to impress the modern crowd and called it a day.
Season 1 was better tbh, it goes downhill from there on. Not that season 1 was great.
Jason Isaacs was doing the best he could to hold the show together, but once he left it was all downhill.
That's true. When the main characters are insufferable you can't get far.
Season 3 was definitely better than the other seasons, definitely had some good moments.

Kinda sad Dadmiral Vance's replicator quote is technically non canon now.

Except for the resolution of that season arc. That was just weird, and ignored part of the mystery they'd set up earlier.
Discovery is still canon, still prime. Don’t fall for clickbait.
Going back and watching the original Star Trek is something…

I never knew that the action packed space drama came from a preachy arduous allegory to irrelevant social dilemmas. Unwatchable.

The rebrands are pretty interesting but I’m trying to figure out how those even happened now.

How did the IP go from controversial lessons to flashy space wars.

> irrelevant social dilemmas

Some of them, others not so much. In the original series there was an episode on computerized warfare and efficiency (Season 1 Episode 23 A Taste of Armageddon). In the later series "The Next Generation" there was an episode on AI and rights (Season 2 Episode 9 The Measure of a Man).

Both still get cited in actual work, probably because it's easier to direct someone to watch a reasonably short and entertaining TV episode than some 300 page book on the subject.

The Measure of a Man is one of those episodes that drives me nuts. I re watched that season recently. The debate about artificial life is an important one but the framing is terrible: Data already being so far beyond the argument. Sure, someone might want to dismantle him but the idea that a court case would need to weigh it up for more than 30 seconds is preposterous. And the idea of the bridge crew accepting that Data would be dismantled if the court case succeeds rather than starting with the position of "if you go near our friend we'll shoot you with guns" to make it clear it would be a pr disaster for the federation.
2009 reboot movie was an obvious turning point, seemed like it was being used as an audition for Star Wars.

IIRC there were behind the scenes politics involved due to who owned the rights, like they were able to use the names and setting but it had to be "thematically" different to not infringe on previous series, which were owned by a different company.