TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

I kinda feel bad for Disco fans. I ain't out there to yuck anyone's yums, but it was such a different kind of show to previous Star Treks, I'm not surprised it didn't land well with many fans. And it's become so commonplace to shit on it (for many valid reasons but also some nasty ones and folks with the latter should fuck right off).

I wore a Star Trek shirt to a wedding and got many compliments, one from a guy who explained his favorite was Discovery, even named his cat after Michael, he felt it was really important to him and asked what I thought about it. I got a battery of polite things to say in this situation, but a more drunken attendee practically lept over to exclaim "Discovery? MAN that one blew chunks!! What were they thinking?? Shoulda been another sci-fi show without the Trek name." and, jeez, read the room!

I guess what I'm saying is, we don't gotta all like it, but Disco fans are Trek fans and we gotta be nice to em, they're here for largely the same reasons we are and, hey, maybe one day they'll go back and learn that the best Trek is Deep Space Nine.

Off the top ... this is my personal opinion and take ... it's a hot topic and from the start, I'll apologize if I get anything terribly wrong or if I offend anyone.

After several of you encouraged me, I went and binge watched the entire series over about two months. The start was exciting and I was happy to see so many new ideas and story lines created for the show. As a person of colour (I'm Indigenous Canadian) I was also happy to see characters of varied colour, backgrounds, species, orientations and sexualities in the show ... it made sense because a future open world won't just be a cast of uniformly identical individuals everywhere. A uniform group of individuals that all look, act and present in the same way are always painted as villains like the Borg, so why would civilization aspire for universal conformity?

I loved the characters and potential for growth of their individual stories like Tilly, Saru, Owosekun, Detmer, Reno, Nahn ... or the couple of Stamets/Culber, and Adira/Gray

I enjoyed Burnham at first and I loved the idea of a female woman of colour taking a lead of the show .... but to me, they went overboard with her storyline and her personality. In the TOS series, Captain Kirk played a part in events in the galaxy ... he didn't become central in the fate of the universe. I think the problem they had was that Burnham almost became like a God-like character that was central to the future of the entire universe. I like making characters important ... it just gets difficult when you surround the entire universe around one person because then the stories all become the same ... the universe is in danger because of one person, so it can only be saved by one person. And no matter what is going to happen in the future, you know that it will always revolve around that one person.

All the other Star Trek leads were passive participants in a greater story (I've only ever watched TOS, TNG, VOY and some of DS9) ... Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Sisko mostly played roles where they were part of events in the galaxy that involved them but their survival didn't hinge on the fate of entire galaxy or universe ... their stories are usually stories of survival that would have been resolved whether or not they lived or not. Burnham is different ... all her stories revolve around her and the fate of the entire universe hinges on just her, which was exciting the first time ... but lost it's suspense every other time it happened.

But about the most disappointing thing for me in the series was a lack of seeing the character JET RENO. I would have loved to see Reno square off with Stamets more often in engineering and the science lab.

I would love a spinoff show that centred around Engineering with Reno ... and maybe an episode where they could bring together all the Star Trek engineers ... Scotty, Laforge, O'Brien and all the other engineer characters and even throw Data in their too in some time warp multiverse event that unexpectedly brings them all together for a brief moment.

I think that was my favourite part of Discovery .... the potential for more ... the potential to see more of a story from each of the characters that made up the show.

I started hating Discovery. I ended loving it. The things I hated to start off were the retcon of the Klingons and the fact that it felt closer to the reboot films than the previous Treks. But there’s so much to love about it. The story is pretty incredible. It was definitely more intense than previous Treks, the character development was great. There was just enough humor to break things up. The twists were actual twists for the most part.

I honestly think people were hoping for something more utopian, forgetting about the timeframe of the show comes before even TOS, so things are more chaotic. It’s not my favorite Trek, but I think I’d put it around TNG if not above it.

My main issue with the show is Burnham, so I don't think there's anything they can do to fix it for me unless they kill her off and get a new lead. The show has been going long enough, I'd watch one last season, but I think they need to end it and focus on strange new worlds and more shows like that.

I stand by Discovery, I enjoy that show. My main complaint is that I could've used more Jason Isaacs.

I get the criticism about production, plot, and dialogue decisions. I mean, I agree on quite a few of them. But a good chunk of the detractors are on the hate bandwagon because they just can't stand women/minorities getting representation, and those dumbfucks need to GTFO. It's Trek, for fuck's sake. Yeah, Discovery is different, but I still dig the show.

ENT at least wanted to be a Star Trek show. Disco banked on the IP for nostalgia and then did nothing nostalgic with it.

I'm fine with people liking Disco or whatever but it's like, the show only got good after they went a billion years into the future and were allowed to thrive in their own sandbox, rather than being tied down in the TOS era.

I would have immediately enjoyed it more if they had made it a post-Nemesis starting point. It would have been more interesting to check in on the Terran Rebellion than it was to check in on the Empire. All that stuff was gross.

Strange New Worlds takes all the new aesthetics established by Disco and actually applies a Star Trek formula to it, and I'm much happier with that show. It wants to be where it is, and it wants to be what it's doing. Intent and planning are everything with media. Disco lacked in both early on, but I'm glad it pivoted.

I don't hate it, I simply don't care about it.

There's 2 ways I believe you can view and criticize art, you can criticize it for what it is, or for what it isn't.

I see a lot of the discourse and criticism around Discovery being much more focused on what it isn't. That isn't a fault of the show itself, that is a fault of the watcher.

You can love the Mona Lisa, but if you go and look at Starry Night and say "I don't like it because it doesn't have a woman in it", that's ridiculous. Is it a valid opinion? Sure, in the sense that any opinion on something subjective is. But the fact you don't like it because it doesn't have a woman isn't the fault of the art or the artist.

Art is viewed subjectively, it can only be interpreted that way. Your beliefs and feelings towards any art is informed by who you are as a person, your experiences, etc. It's why I hate the need fans of every fandom feels to compare and argue about which iteration of any series is "better" than another. What TNG was to me isn't going to 100% line up with what it was to you, art is interpreted, those interpretations are unique to every person.

It seems a lot of people went into Discovery expecting it to fit their view of what "Star Trek" is. That's fine, but saying the show is "objectively" bad because it doesn't fit their expectations of what "Star Trek" is, is absurd and reductive. It's not the fault of the art.

I found every season stylistically jarring on first watch, and it made it hard to just enjoy the first time through, especially since it was the world's first look at what new Trek was going to be like. But on second/third watch, all of the seasons except 1 are honestly pretty good. I'd take Seasons 3 or 4 of Discovery over, say, Season 1 of TNG, all of Enterprise, or season 2 of Voyager, any day. I think for me it's a little overwhelming on first watch because it's A - pretty high concept B - visual smorgasboard C - fast-paced. They'll drop some important ideas or concepts really quickly then it's back to the action. There's no time to let ideas settle in, so you're just suffering whiplash the whole time going from high concept to explosion to high concept to emotional moment to explosion to high concept. It's honestly not bad, I actually enjoy media that's too complicated to really grok the first time around, and it seems clear the fast-paced, high-concept intensity of the story is entirely part of the point, but I think this contributes to its lack of appreciation. Most people are probably gonna need to watch it a few times for the stories to really sink in.

I can throw on reruns of older Treks and kind of relax to them. I need to like, get hyped to watch Discovery.

Tons of issues, won't deny that, but if people can look back fondly on Enterprise, I suspect they'll be look back fondly on Discovery.

Nice try, Star Trek Discovery producers. You got me to try season 1. Not fooling me again.

If I wanted to watch Star Wars, then I would have watched that instead.

I don't have time right now to watch the video, but if you're not on their, Stamets, he'll need to update it to add an 11th reason