Star Trek Discovery Is Cancelled And Fans Are Divided

The problem with Burnham wasn't that she was female or black, it was that the writers wanted to make her the center of the universe. Hopefully that got better after the first season, but she was clearly the writers' darling. Making her Spock's "inspirational" sister was just another nail in the coffin.

Mary Sue in space. ST:D lived up to it's name for the bane it was.

Despite all it's "diversity" - which was largely superficial. it was Mary Sue's show... they retconned history and made her the most special snowflake of all time, anywhere, everywhere... without building up her character. So, what growth could she possibly have? It was a badly written fanfic.

R3 And their "brilliant idea" to not fuck up ST canon was to send them all to the future and decide that no one would mention them again - total horseshit. If Burnham had been a white male, the show would have still sucked.

[quote]it was that the writers wanted to make her the center of the universe.

That's generally what they do with the Captain (which eventually she became) on the show. DS9's Sisko got a bit more of a break but DS9 was such a BIG show and in the end it was about him and his journey.

I didn't like Discovery because it was a bit too dark for me. I didn't realize that until Strange New Worlds came on and I appreciated how every story was dotted with hope for continued exploration in the galaxy. I liked that TNG vibe mixed with the Original Series. It's also why I couldn't watch DS9 until I was an adult.

Comparing today's season length to back when Enterprise was still on air is just silly, the TV landscape has changed so much since then. Plus, it costs so much more to produce movie-level visuals for each episode, something old Trek simply wasn't known for.

Five seasons these days is a more than decent run, I can't see Strange New Worlds getting even that.

r5 But DS9 could integrate other characters better... we got to know them and their motivations. Sisko was shown to have faults. All of them were really... and most of the time, they were not endearing faults or things that turned out to work for them. He didn't want to be the emissary either and it was troubling for all parties involved. They really could have delved more into the darker parts and also would have been better to let Dax fully die.,. the replacement, though, having a decent arc the actress wasn't the right fit. Worf was a questionable fit, too. Lwaxana Troi could have a bigger role.. would have been interesting with Quark or Nog. Or hijack the PsiCorp theme from Bab 5 for the dominion (shadow) war. Which would have added more flavor for PIcard or ST:SNW.

R7 I hate Ezri, she was just annoying. They should have made the next Dax a male again, to further shake things up.

Well, I liked the show and am disappointed with this news. I’d waited decades for the franchise to finally have the balls to present gay relationship and I’m pleased I lived to see it. Now, I was alienated by new Klingons and a series premiere that largely had me reading subtitles, but I do know the queer themes alienated many more.

R7, true. What I meant by, the show was "BIG" is that it wasn't necessarily about the Captain leading them along on missions. I felt like it was a much more political show. We had 111 more episodes of DS9 than we've currently had of Discovery.

Don't get me started on Ezri Dax. I felt bad for that actress because it seemed like they found her character's footing by the end of the single-season she was on there. I did like them showing us more about the Trill. The whole, "Just because that's Dax's symbiote doesn't mean that it's Dax," I think, was a good arc. It gave Worf (more so than everyone else) something to deal with.

While I wasn't a fan of Discovery, I did like the actors on the show. I don't blame Burnham's actress for anything involving the character. I think she did her best.

Finally, I absolutely loved that they ended up constantly using and letting us get to know the other bridge crew that we saw in episodes. It was so much more realistic that we look at chairs and see/know that the people sitting in them are Detmer, Owosekun, etc. and not just random new people they rotate in and out every episode for years.

I'll admit that it has been amusing watching some of the most vocal critics overplay their hands a bit on the subjects of race, gender, and sexuality. There are legit criticisms of the show and characters, but arguments that distill down to 'not enough straight white guys' only play to like audiences.

There's also the argument that the show is focusing on pushing ideas of diversity and inclusion to the detriment of actually having good stories. If humanity has sorted itself out in the future, how necessary is it to emphasize gay or non-binary individuals/relationships? At least that's how the argument goes. I'm not really sure where I fall on that.

People like Youtube commentators who are monetizing their review content tend I think towards hyperbole and controversy - it's a good way to build a following. Bottom line though is that disagree with part of someone's argument doesn't necessarily mean that none of it is valid.

[quote]Finally, I absolutely loved that they ended up constantly using and letting us get to know the other bridge crew that we saw in episodes.

r10 And what exactly did you get to know about Bryce, the only black guy on the bridge who said goodbye in the fourth season? Seriously, tell me one thing about him. The fact that we knew shit about him after four seasons because so much time had been wasted on Little Miss Perfect's speeches is the reason I did a 180 on this show. Same for that gorgeous Asian twink Rhys. I had so much hope for both when the show first started, but in the end they were used as ethnic set dressing only. Owosekun isn't far behind.

I agree that the actress playing Burnham's isn't to blame, this is all on the showrunners and their bizarre fixation on just this one character.

love this show

Star Trek has unfortunately become part of the culture wars that have taken over nearly everything. You couldn't go into a single discussion online about Star Trek ANYWHERE without at least one person complaining about how Discovery and also the animated Lower Decks were "woke" and ruining the franchise. Of course William Shatner has gotten into it on Twitter a few times too and sides with the assholes complaining that Star Trek is "woke now," and his comments made the news, so that didn't help anything.

Stopped watching after they introduced the non-binary and trans couple.

R14, one could also argue that, especially after the weird nonbinary/trans character and nonsensical storylines were added, you couldn't go ten minutes in any episode without having multiple woke advertising campaigns shoved down your throat. Could they have even tried to cast less annoying actors as the nonbinary and trans characters? And, their storylines made no sense. In 300 years, no one is going to announce their fucking pronouns and whine about it, especially anyone having anything to do with the Trill. And, I'm still not sure what the ghost tranny thing was. The obvious girl was nonbinary and the other obvious girl was a boy. Worst shit in Trek history.

I'm glad they're done. I hope the other show runners learned from this how to incorporate diverse stories without using a club and actors/characters who would have been better off with bags over their heads.

I guess the action figures weren't selling

It was poorly conceived, poorly written, poorly cast, and poorly acted. Buh-bye!

The first season was great and then they leaned into transparently woke casting and plots. There are shows that do a great job of diverse casting and themes but this show got so fucking preachy. If I want a sermon I’ll go to church.

If I had been cast in the lead, the show would have been an enormous success due to my superb acting and likeability.

At the beginning, I felt sorry for Jason Isaacs but now I think he dodged a bullet by the arc his character had taken.

Didn't Discovery change show runners or something after the second season? It all went to hell after that.

Burnham will close the show with a violin swelling 15 minute monologue on how she saved the universe but could not save her own show.

Gay Stamets will merely retort "I SAID you in DANGER GIRL last season and you didn't listen. BYE!

r16

[quote]The first season was great and then they leaned into transparently woke casting and plots.

The original series would also have qualified as "transparently woke" back in the day, and crotchety old people complained about it regularly, just like you are right now.

A lot of the trouble is that people in 2023 who like older "Star Trek" properties grew up watching them after society had progressed and the show was no longer "woke." They don't understand what the show has always been about.

R25 Not forgetting the "what a charming Negress" thing with fake!Lincoln, I think for the most part the show was content to make its point by example rather than by beating the audience over the head with it.

That said, season 1 of TNG in particular was chocked full of "we aren't savage and primitive like those 20th century people" moments.

It's unfortunate that DSC may be remembered as too woke. Pending the upcoming season I will remember it as the worst written Star Trek show, especially after season 2. And the acting wasn't far behind. If you have a valid story with a message and you're a good writer, you'll find ways to convey the message. This show simply didn't know how to write engaging stories or characters. Social messages were hit into the audience's head with a hammer, see the trans couple. The lack of subtlety was what pissed me off most. The way they sold the message wasn't just heavy handed, it was also condescending in a way. "We must be very clear about the message; otherwise viewers may not get what we have to say."

Stamets and Culber were seen first as 'the ordinary couple in space' that discussed work problems while brushing teeth. That resonated with me. The discussion about pronouns did not.

There were a couple other things that bothered me like poor acting skills, weird direction (why did everybody whisper when something deep is to be said?). But the writing really ruined it for me.

[quote]A lot of the trouble is that people in 2023 who like older "Star Trek" properties grew up watching them after society had progressed and the show was no longer "woke." They don't understand what the show has always been about.

Oh, bullshit. The vast majority of those who love the older Trek watched it when it was originally on or, for TOS, in reruns that were already running 30+ years ago, not too long after it had originally run. Plus, we're not fucking idiiots who are ignorant of history and context.

The point is that on Discovery, the episode with Kirk and Uhura kissing would have been a three episode arc with a lead up to it containing mulitple references to the Civil Rights movement and how racist Earth used to be, and endless discussion among the crew about how great they now were that them kissing was not a big deal unlike when everyone was so racist, blahblahblah. Instead, they just did the story with the kiss and fuck you if you have a problem with it. The half black, half white people fighting because of what side their color was on would have been an entire season.

Discovery forgot it was supposed to be showing an aspirational future and instead decided to be a neverending disapproving lecture, that was its downfall.

The first season was good but uneven. The second was great. With season three in the far future, the show seemed unsure of how to proceed and became a mess. The fourth was just awful. Throughout the series, Michael was way too perfect and not compelling enough as the lead character. She really was a Mary Sue in how she was ALWAYS right about everything.

The show's social messaging was also heavy-handed and kind of obnoxious. Adira and Gray aren't bad characters because they're trans; they're bad characters because the show never gave them anything interesting to do and mostly treated them as an excuse to pat itself on the back.

I don't have a problem with the show ending with season five. After the terrible season four finale, I thought about dropping the show. So Paramount made the decision for me.

I gave up after the first season because the whole thing about the fungus warp drive just didn't make any sense to me, and the visual design was confusing. I also hate the mirror universe (even though it became a ST staple, the only good mirror universe episode is from the original series), and the acting was weak.

I'm not going to be loyal to a Star Trek show just because it's Star Trek. It has to be good.

R29, I inadvertently gave you an FF. I meant to give yo a WW. Sorry about that.

Discovery was also a victim of the confusing and reductive storylines brought to ST because Paramount couldn't figure out how to reboot the franchise without bringing in Hollywood mainstays that made it look and feel like every other (bad) space opera. Yes, I'm looking at JJ Abrams throwing canon to the wind and taking on an alternate timeline without resolution... much like the entirety of Discovery. See also: relying on alternate timelines and overuse of message-laden story arcs that would have, like R28, been resolved in a single episode rather than repeatedly hitting us over the heads with heavy-handed morality for an entire 10 episode season only to have the whole thing turned into something akin to Bobby Ewing emerging from a shower.

SIX YEARS???

The obsession writers of superhero comics and movies and TV and sci-fi shows and movies have with parallel universes and timelines really frustrates me. I know they like writing about them is because it allows them to do different things with the characters (whom have usually been unfun to write because they were conceived of too simplistically originally), but they become confusing and tedious.

[quote]And what exactly did you get to know about Bryce, the only black guy on the bridge who said goodbye in the fourth season? Seriously, tell me one thing about him.

He spoke Welsh and he liked studying under a tree when he was at Star Fleet Academy in San Fran. He was also temporarily assigned to the USS Curie.

Don't be obtuse. You intentionally chose the one person they did the least for in order to make some sort of a point that you didn't need to make.

As I said, it's the Michael Burnham show and that's one of the reasons I didn't like it but they did do more for those random background characters than any Trek Series had done, even in a large cast where they're definitely not the focus.

Also we know a lot about Rhys if you were paying attention.

[quote] but they did do more for those random background characters than any Trek Series had done

Ahem... not quite.

I always thought TNG did a lot for expanding all the character's backgrounds except Geordi's (and of course the surly Dr. Pulaski Diana Muldaur played for one season) . We knew tons about Data's, Worf's, and Deanna's, and a fair amount about Riker's, and we did get the one (albeit awful) episode about Dr. Crusher and her planet of the Scottish kilts people and the ghost that haunted her. We even learned bout tasha Yar's background and visited ehr home planet after she died.

We oddly got almost nothing about Geordi's--we knew about his parents working in Star Fleet, and his disability, but we never found out what really happened with his eyes or why he was so nerdy.

We probably would have learned more about Dr. Pulaski had she stuck around longer.

The problem with learning about the backgrounds of characters on the Star Trek was often that they were uninteresting. Most of the characters were given just one background personal interest (archaeology for Picard, chocolate for Troi, the trombone for Riker, and then on the other series baseball for Sisko and romance holodeck novels for Janeway) and usually little else, mostly due to the writer's limited imaginations. When characters became more interesting it was usually because we saw family problems they had: Troi's impossible overbearing mother, Worf's difficulties with his brother and son (well the son got very boring) and his warm relationship with his kind adoptive Russian parents, Picard's problems with his estranged brother.

[quote]We oddly got almost nothing about Geordi's--we knew about his parents working in Star Fleet, and his disability, but we never found out what really happened with his eyes or why he was so nerdy.

There was nothing to say about Geordi's eyes. They told us he was born blind. We "met" his mother in "Interface" when he learned she died and we also met his father that episode. Thinking back, the Hugh stuff, the whole thing with him being in love with a hologram Brahms, him hanging out with Scotty, the girlfriend whose name he cleared of murder, him dealing with Barkley, etc. we got quite a lot out of Geordie.

Glad to see that he recognized that his character barely had a sex life and the whole Leah Brahms thing was creepy.

Here's a list of his spotlight episodes. Seem like he had one every season.

The best version of Star Trek

New clip for season 5 is out. Why they want to show a monster-of-the week as a highlight for the season - I don't know. And why is Burnham whispering even in this? I guess the show stays true to itself.

I could not forgive the idea the Enterprise would be run on magic mushrooms. That was ridiculous.

I hated the mirror universe episodes. I hate the mirror universe. I want all movies and TV shows to ban the idea of alternate timelines and multiverses. It's just laziness.

The whole series was just too grim.

I think "Strange New World" is a far better show and far more fun.

I won't be sad to see it go. So much of it just didn't work.

Strange New Worlds is vastly better and feels more like Star Trek than Discovery ever has. Could you see Discovery doing a musical episode and having it be good? Michael would probably cry the entire time.

Best thing about Star Trek Discovery is/was Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou.

I’ve been a Trekkie all my life but I will not miss this show.

R43 And then they got rid of her!

I'm rewatching Season 1, and although I like it better than I did originally, there some mind-numbingly stupid things, like the entire Mudd/Space Whale/time warp episode. Wow, it was awful.