Without a doubt, STD is the most controversial series in the franchise. What do you like about the series as a whole? What do you dislike about the series as a whole?
I despise how it praises and glorifies lone-wolf mentality and has a blatant Mary Sue main character.
And they changed the Klingons for no reason
And it’s missing the emphasis on teamwork and competence and problem solving and morality that I love in Star Trek.
Also the whole idea of the spore drive is stupid and doesn’t need to exist. It’s dumb.
I hate that it’s tied to the mirror universe, its disrespect of Star Trek canon, and the fact that it’s about a main character, not the crew.
Michael Burnham and how stretched her story was. I’m more of an episodic fan too. Then you had a lot of subplots that made no sense or didn’t matter. Also annoying characters got way too much screen time. Not sure why so many of them must be quirky to be interesting? Overall my most disliked Star Trek.
There was this tardigrade episode that was fantastic, I wish STD had all been like that.
I like Saru. I like the show’s aesthetic. That’s about where it ends. May as well do the dislikes as bullet points for readability.
- The tie-in of Michael being Spock’s never-before-mentioned adopted sibling just feels like bad fanfiction.
- Most of the crew is so neglected that I didn’t even know their names in Season 2. This came to a head when in one episode they were going to kill a bridge character and had to spend 20 minutes at the beginning of the episode highlighting her life so that when they did kill her, the audience would actually care.
- I dislike the constantly very high stakes. The series feels like an extremely long action film.
- Trill lore changes
- Season 1 Klingon design choices. Besides the hair thing, I also think a lot could have been done to flesh out the culture and highlight differences between the various houses’ traditions besides basically assigning them colour differences.
I’m sure there was a lot more that bothered me, but it’s been so long since I stopped caring enough to watch that I’ve probably forgotten.
I think your opinion relfects mine the most so I just piggyback on your comment.
Maybe I’d go one step further with your second point that specifically giving Michael Burnham the spotlight 95% of the time has been a bad decision. On the hand the series relies on all of the crew, on the other hand it is almost always Michael who is involved in finding the solution or making the decision.
I hate watched this last season. I just don’t care what happens to that crew, which is a first for Star Trek. I’m hoping for a Newhart ending and the whole series is a dream Spock is having.
My initial reaction was it was not star Trek, but game of thrones in space with over the top emotionality and focus on individual power struggles. Like, Star Trek at it’s best is about how people of limited power organized to understand and coexist in the universe. This has nothing to do with that, but was all there is an evil universe and it’s all or nothing to survive.
I liked the actual spoken klingon-- a technical feat of bringing a new language to life.
It was really beautiful
I was weirdly uncomfortable but also ended up really liking the red headed engineering lady’s character and role-- something actually kind of new for Star Trek, I think.
Reason I stopped watching, apart from disinterest in an arching plot that’s more like medieval warrior king business, was the focus on a tear jerking character that in any other series would get a couple one off episodes, but here was supposed to be driving the main plot and was just way to much of her.
It could just be me: the expanse annoyed me the same way after a while with the scruffy captain guy crying and doing dumb emotional things every episode. I get that that’s the point of a lot of plots tragic flaw that’s actually a strength because love wins or whatever, but the melodramatic representation… I guess I’m looking for short form thought experiments, not the fate of humanity and everyone you love rests on the knife edge of one character’s emergency therapy session.
Star Trek is supposed to explore the structures we build to prevent the need for emergency therapy in spite of the fact that we are all just weak emotional people.
Whispering every line, especially when they are speaking one on one. Like who whispers everything?
A lot of shows have audio issues, Discovery is a top culprit.
I hate it. I tried to like it but overall, I am appalled by it. There was one exception: The way they portrayed the relationship between Stamets and Culber was nice. However, the dumpster fire at the center of the show is Burnham. I have never seen a show try to glorify a main character like that unless there was some irony involved. STD really shoves Burnham down your throat again and again. SHE saves the day/ship/federation/universe. She is praised constantly, just in case you idiot failed to realize how magnificent she is, and, hey, did we mention, she is…ummm…SPOCK’S…SISTER!!! Yes, his sister! What? Doesn’t make sense? Shut up and love her already! Then, the plot holes. Would it have been so unbearably hard to write scripts that at least try to look consistent and logical? As for the dialogs: they are important to show how great Burnham is. I found myself skipping over most of them without missing anything important. Oh, and, then there’s Saru‘s sister piloting a fighter while Burnham‘s mom returns from the dead to join a ROMULAN order of warrior nuns. In my opinion, as personal and inconsequential it may be, this show is a big F*** YOU! to Trek fans.
It’s art direction, and being centered around a character I personally dislike. Strange New Worlds fixed all of this, I love it to the bones.
Lots of problems, lots, but for me it was the Klingons that made this show unwatchable.
That’s one of my largest issues, they tried to reinvent Klingons.
I don’t dislike it, I actually truly enjoyed the first two and half seasons, even thought it is way too centred on Michael; I do miss the synergy with the rest of the crew, that we find in the other series.
About Michael Burnham—yes, she’s highly conflicted emotionally, going batshit Vulcan logic enforcer for a moment then flipping into full emo mode the next. But then again, that fits perfectly with the persona, and she is a wonderful actress to be able to play this with such finesse and subtleness. I get that some may not see or understand the level of acting at play, or it may resonate a bit too much to others, but damn, I personally find Sonequa Martin-Green is amazing in her acting.
What stretch it a bit too much was how fast they were able to get back into service 900 years in the future. But, I’ll close my eyes on this, as it was somehow needed for the plot.
But what truly lost me, are:
• The true reason of The Burn, being the silliest thing possible;
• That crazy turbolift fight, with the pod literally floating through immense football fields of empty space—inside the Discovery?!??
• The fact that the future looks so boringly “sanitized”. And, the tech isn’t that advanced in many points. It’s 900 years forward dammit. Especially with from when they left. Yet it feels like maybe only 200-300 years after Picard, not 600-700 years later, aside for the personal transporters maybe.
My biggest disappointment is that they had a huge chance to show so many potential new worlds, freedom from fixed canon, to show how it changed, with how each world evolved independently. What we briefly glimpsed as she just arrived in the future. But it only lasted for one or two episodes.
I want to see wonders, I want to see exotic worlds, with lustful vegetation and animals, just like they did with the Klingons, making them truly alien. I want to be swooped in and marvelled like the kid I used to be. The fourth season brought back a little of that, with the 10C at the end. But barely.
God damnit, I forgot about the turbolift parallel universe. Holy crap, that was such a weird choice to make. Like, this does not make sense in any sort of way. But they kept doubling down on it, right? Wasn’t this shown like 2 or 3 times throughout the series?
I believe they did…
Oh, and I forgot about the Sphere data hiding in the Dots that were being picked out one after another…
As if a massive alien digital intelligence would hide in a bunch of glorified vacuum cleaners…
Most of the characters suck. Tilly is great tho. “Spore drive”, wtf, totally idiotic. Also the red angel shit was too stupid. The tardigrade shit was stupid. I could do with never ever hearing about or seeing fucking Michael burnham ever again. Really disappointing.
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I think it would have been a great show if it wasn’t tied to the Star Trek name.
It didn’t feel very Trekky to me and I really really disliked the Klingon agent plot. I found it upsetting and vulgar for little reason.
The show is pretty good, what I don’t like is how Paramount pulled it from Netflix in Europe 2 days before it was due to air here, with no legal way to watch it until the Paramount+ app was launched here months later.
I think they tried to do a lot of interesting things which ultimatly didn’t work.