It's interesting to go back and see how the 2009 film reawakened my inner Trekkie, and how I enjoyed those films while also feeling like they were “Action Trek” & part Star Wars. (JJ would admit the Kirk-on-his-bike-looking-at-the-Enterprise was directly lifted from the Luke-watches-the-two-suns-set-on-Tatooine scene.)
When Discovery premiered I complained. “This isn't Star Trek. It's interesting, but it isn't Star Trek.” But I would continue to watch.
I didn't like how huge the bridges were. I didn't like how the Klingon ships and armor looked. I didn't like the new Klingon makeup and didn't understand why they were literally black and gray.
But I loved the fluent use of Klingon, seeing it subtitled.
I hated the collars on the Starfleet uniforms but loved the blue jumpsuits which called back to Enterprise. I loved the phasers with the “film projector” emitters.
The captain confounded me. He was no hero.
But still I watched. Something kept bringing me back each week.
It would turn out that I was right – Lorca was not Starfleet material. In fact he was a Terran from the Mirror Universe.
Michael Burnham, our lead, was Spock's adopted sibling and raised on Vulcan, we were told. But she seemed so emotional – her human soul struggling against the colder teachings of Vulcan, I suppose.
Gosh. Sarak was a shit parent, wasn't he? And Amanda too doting, maybe?
Still I knew as well as anyone that Trek regularly took a season or two to find its footing – and that was back when shows regularly had 24 episodes a season! There was enough there to keep me watching, even if I wasn't head over heels for it.
But I did find characters to care about. Saru, in particular. I knew Michael was our lead so I wondered how she would develop. I felt bad though, that both Trek shows with a Black lead didn't start them out as captains.
Like... what is that all about? Sisko had to “earn” the captain's pip at the end of season 3 of Deep Space Nine. Captain America gave Sam the shield, but entire through plot of “Falcon and the Winter Solder” was that Sam had to earn the title of Captain America... and the person in charge of the next Captain America movie said that Sam will have to “go through trials”. What the fuck?
It's racism disguised as liberalism, Harold. (Remember how the show had to earn the ability to let Sisko grow a goatee & shave his head because the studio was worried he would look “too aggressive”?)
At least Lower Decks bypassed that by making the captain of the Cerritos a Black woman – and our lead, Mariner, didn't want to be promoted.
So what was next? Picard? Oh, Picard. Picard.
I'd caught old reruns of TOS and enjoyed the TV runs of the Kirk-era movies but the first-run Star Trek series I grew up with was TNG, and boy oh boy I hated Nemesis.
Here was a chance to right the wrongs. Except it debuted and... it wrote more wrongs. lol.
Who was this arrogant asshole calling himself Picard? Wait, didn't Beverly treat him for Irumodic syndrome in All Good Things? He called the STARGAZER doctor?
Why is Picard dreaming about and pining after Data? I mean, he liked Data just fine – respected him sure. But he'd lost people before. He'd lost fucking Jack Crusher.
Wait what? B4 didn't work out, OK, but what are all these “synths”? Isn't this what Measure of a Man was all about? “A fleet of Datas”? COME ON!
Why are we introducing this River Tam stand-in? Oh hey, bra shot. Ninja bikers? If she's “not activated” wouldn't it be better to take her quietly?
Like anyway, not to get all hyper detailed and nitpicky because I CAN, but Picard was horribly out of character and obstinate the entire season. That he would completely shut himself off from the Enterprise bridge crew was just so frustrating.
But trying to mix in Picard's issues, the synth attack, Romulans, ex-Borg, “organic synths”, then some ancient Romulan prediction that AI would destroy the universe as we know it because some giant lobster would invade???
The entire conceit of bio-identical androids completely ignores the fact that during TNG we were already introduced to Data's “mother”. Herself an advanced Soong android that was almost completely indistinguishable from a biological being.
It also had absolutely zero to do with the Romulans and Borg subplots and even less with the Picard has retired to a winery and is dying plot.
What IS the main plot of S1 of Picard?
I hated it.
Lower Decks premiered, and the shower runner was the guy who wrote the TNG Season 8 Twitter and someone who would write on Rick 'n Morty. I was nervous because while Trek had some funny episodes and a twinkle in the eye humor, it hadn't gone full burp and fart humor.
I was pleasantly surprised by the deep, deep cuts that only core Trekkies would get, interspersed with... well, yelling and crude humor.
It wasn't classic Trek but it KNEW Trek. I loved it.
Somewhere in here is S2 of Discovery and it re-introduced us to Captain Pike.
Oh, man. Now Pike — Pike was a Starfleet captain. The casting was amazing and Anson Mount knocked it out of the park. But I was also a little wary because frankly he outshined our lead, Michael Burnham.
I also had to worry about the “kill your gays trope”. The weird Klingon sexual assault memory? Bare Klingon tiddies? The mushroom spores are... talking to Stamets? What in the world?
Oh but don't worry, here's another bloody universe-ending catastrophic event. Sigh. See, it turns out there's this advanced AI that is.... controlling communications and threatens the Federation and can remotely control Starfleet's ships and the Discovery has an advanced AI all its own now that the other AI wants to absorb and the only way to ensure the safety of the universe is to... travel to the far future with the AI on Discovery? It's called CONTROL.
Whatever. They succeed in going through the time warp singular event thing and wrap up the Pike subplot with him going back to Enterprise. There the entire existence of spore drive on Discovery, the advanced AI and the ship travelling to the future are classified making sure that the season had no lasting impact on future history because that would break canon.
Anyway! Star Trek Prodigy premiered and I didn't know if I'd like it. It's targeted at a much younger audience of course. Murf... I don't love Murf. He's a sentient burp and fart joke.
Not loving the design of Jankom Pog. BUT. It's building lore and introducing characters. And when they find and activate hologram Janeway? Wow.
I kind of love the idea of holographic coffee. lol. I like that she's teaching them about Starfleet and the Federation.
I love that these characters, who couldn't previously talk to one another, are learning to communicate. They're learning about team work. They're learning to strive for more.
It's for kids, but it doesn't seem to be talking down to them. And I love that it's teaching new viewers what the elements of Star Trek mean and why so many of us love it... through the teachings of hologram Janeway.
I dig this show.
Discovery Season 3 spends time showing how Michael has to “move on” from the Discovery and its crew, finding a partner who brings her into underground courier work, and hints at the passage of time as her hair grows and her clothes change. It's an interesting direction to take the character — what does she do away from Vulcan, away from Starfleet?
But just as quickly as it's introduced, the plot is dropped too. See, since the Discovery entered the... wormhole-thingy at the end of S2 behind Michael, there was time-dilation so what was like a year for Michael was only... a week? for the crew of the Discovery. So they were all very happy to have their friend back and safe.
Except it reset Michael to once again being the outsider who didn't quite fit in, who didn't know if she belonged, who had to again earn trust and her place on the crew. And, you know, of course there's this big threat-to-the-universe-as-we-know-it threat again, this time called THE BURN.
And how seriously they say it too. THE BURN. Anyway so, this season is about overthrowing the Orion Syndicate in an area of space, finding out that Earth has separated from the greater Federation and become insular, introducing a non-binary human host for a Trill worm that also lets them see and interact with the worm's previous host — their trans boyfriend — find the new Starfleet & Federation headquarters, which has since become one and the same thing, figure out both exactly what THE BURN is and what caused it, and make sure it never happens again.
You know, what I've noticed about so-called “NuTrek” is that in an attempt to tell an overarching story across 10 or so episodes, nothing that is introduced is ever solved before the finale. They just keep adding elements, adding, adding, adding, until the last episode of the season where they rush to tie it all up in a pretty bow. Could you imagine if something like.... Full House did that? An entire season of a sitcom where they keep introducing issues, solving nothing along the way?
I think Deep Space 9 did a particularly excellent job in later seasons, especially with the Dominion War arc, of giving us 1 or 2 hour episodes that had a beginning, middle and end that still slotted into a season's larger overall story. Babylon 5 was known for it. Battlestar Galactica was pretty good at it. Under Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek — I think — desperately wants to do this too. But nothing is plotted ahead of time and it's like a house of cards falling apart every season.
Lower Decks Season 2 was just more of Season 1, enjoyable, not really breaking any new ground. It's a perfectly okay spin-off that does get to explore a bit of Trek nerd stuff and it comes off as a satire that is really grounded in the “reality” of Trek. In a way it reminds me a little bit of DC's Peacemaker, come to think of it. Like again, not a Trek as we know it, but enjoyable.
At the end of Discovery's Season 3 Saru departed to return to his home planet alongside a new companion and Burnham was promoted to captain. Season 4 starts off right. There's a fun sort of tribute to the beginning of Star Trek into Darkness where Michael and Book are making contact with a race of butterfly (or moth?) people, offering them dilithium and spreading the message of — and an invitation to — the Federation. There's a misunderstanding about whether or not Grudge, Book's cat, is a monarch being held captive and the pair have to run. Very, very cute.
Unfortunately that's kind of where cute ends for the season. Well, except for a story element between a returning Saru & the representative from N'Var, a renamed Vulcan. That whole back and forth was incredibly sweet and never failed to make me smile. That aside though... oh. Hey. it's our old friend, the universe-ending thing that the entire season will revolve around. This time it's a gigantic football that acts like Marvel's Galactus, travelling the stars and devouring planets, causing massive waves of gravity to radiate out and destroy life in the surrounding systems.
Starfleet (or Stamets, though Starfleet quickly adopt the name) have named it THE DMA – the dark matter anomaly. Oh, and um, please don't hold back the shock here, but it's... artificial. So after finding out what it is, they have to find out who made it and how to communicate with them. Kinda... kinda like THE BURN from Season 3, now that I think of it.
Along the way they introduce a hyper-arrogant “mad scientist” who both wants to help find the DMA and also helps Starfleet replicate Stamet's one-of-a-kind spore drive, later shrinking it to the size of a small briefcase and no longer requiring injections of spores or a living host controller. They also don't waste any time explaining how any of it works. Programmable matter, baby!
Writing this very long thing up I have to wonder why I'm still watching Discovery every season. Do I keep hoping it'll get good? Am I a “hater” or do I actually see issues with the storytelling? Well, I think that I really enjoy this cast. They've grown on me and I'm invested in the characters' relationships. But it's sort of everything else that just isn't meshing for me...? I don't know. Why AM I still watching it?
A part of it may be because a few years ago — yes, literal years ago — I decided that if I was gonna call myself a Trekkie, I wanted to be able to say I'd watched every hour of Star Trek that existed. So I began a rewatch in parallel with the new Star Trek Discovery, starting with Enterprise. Then TOS. Then TAS. Then the Kirk movies, then TNG, then DS9 with the TNG movies, then Voyager. I took off my nostalgia classes and over a few years I watched all of Trek. And that still continues.
I discovered Enterprise struggled, affected by the events of 9/11 in the real world, but had really found its footing when it ended abruptly. I discovered that a lot of the original series doesn't hold up if you take the nostalgia goggles off. I discovered that the closest movie to what old school “Star Trek” was all about was The One With The Whales. I discovered The Next Generation wasn't quite as I remembered it, having just as many missteps as successes. I discovered a newfound love for Deep Space 9 that I had never had before, spurred on by Trump's America, what appeared (and still appears) to be a looming New Civil War, Black Lives Matter and my own transness. I discovered that as much as I didn't like Voyager, when the show was over I missed Neelix, I loved Seven of Nine, and I was angry Harry never got a field promotion.
As I write this we just finished Season 2 of Picard and what started with promise ended... with a little bit of a whimper. The same issues of drawing in too much and wrapping things up all at once. But the production was pretty gorgeous, with the Stargazer sets — something I'm sure we'll see again in Season 3. I saw Alison Pill just knock it out of the park and I'm sad she won't be returning. I saw some really great fan service that while exciting, ultimately was... unfortunately... only skin deep.
It's already known that Season 3 is in post-production, and I believe returns this winter. We know that the majority of the TNG cast will be back in some capacity or another. To be honest I'm not sure I'm as excited for it as I was when everything was first announced, but I will be tuning in. I have to. I want to see Beverly and Geordi and Worf and Riker and Troi...
We also watched the first episode of Strange New Worlds, submitted to the academy for your approval. Paramount+ is spending some big money on this show. The return of Pike, Spock, and Number One. The sets look incredible. The effects are gorgeous. They've tidied up the Enterprise model and they've found a balance between the look of TOS and what we expect from top-production scifi today.
I reserve judgement but I will say that I think it's the single best premiere we've seen out of the Alex Kurtzman era of Star Trek. It FEELS like Star Trek again. A story with a beginning, middle and end, with a hook to bring you in next week and a promise of a through line with sustained character development and growth. THIS. THIS is what I've wanted from new Star Trek. Admittedly something that Prodigy gave me. Something that for being a satirical spinoff, Lower Decks has given me. But it's something Discovery and Picard have both struggled to do.
I hope that Strange New Worlds doesn't overshadow Discovery because for all its flaws, Discovery is what got us here. Discovery made a Black woman the lead for the first time in franchise history – something quickly followed up by Lower Decks. At this point it doesn't make sense to make Discovery episodic, but I want them to figure out how to break a single story out to 10 hours and not just keep piling more on and on and on and on just to wrap it all up in the last hour with a pretty bow.
Thinking ahead about Season 5 of Discovery makes me anxious. We have a capable cast. I hope Paramount gives them a story worthy of their caliber. And as I wait to tune in to the second episode of Strange New Worlds, I hope Paramount doesn't fumble. Again.
I'm not here to rain on anyone's parade. If you have enjoyed Discovery – if Discovery has brought you into the fold as a first time viewer, if you adore Star Trek Picard.... I'm genuinely happy for you and I hope they inspire you to go back and watch other incarnations. If you like Discovery and Picard I really think you'll like Deep Space Nine, especially in later seasons.
And if you've read this huge, meandering draft of a blog, please let me know how you feel both about what I've said and about Star Trek as a whole. After all the entire philosophy of Star Trek is contained in the Vulcan IDIC. Infinite Diversity, in Infinite Combinations. We're all different, and Star Trek is big enough for every one of us. LLAP.