So I finished Star Trek Discovery last night, so figured I’d try to purge my last thoughts about it so I can go on to never discussing it again. I mean, not actually, but I feel like it has dominated my writeable thoughts lately. Overall, I liked the fifth season - its plot seemed a little sillier and lower stakes than previous seasons, which I actually count as an improvement. As mentioned before, Burnham in the Captain’s chair has finally created the space for the other characters to breathe, which is good. Saru and Tilly being partially written off probably also helped them make room for other characters, although to be honest they’re my two favorite characters so I have mixed feelings, but they were both still in the season a bunch so I really don’t have anything to complain about - if anything there was less Tilly last season, since this season they brought her back on the thinnest of justifications.
Speaking of, this is a random thought, but in the first episode of the season, Tilly goes back to her room drunk with another Starfleet officer and I really could not tell if they were suppose to be flirting or not? They both are acting kinda flirty, and Tilly very drunk, but then they sort of both just politely separated with no clear indicator of whether they were actually flirting, and then he was never seen from again. Felt almost like a scene was cut where they sloppy kissed and then he said he should go because she was too drunk. Which, on the one hand, I don’t think we need to raise the spectre of date rape for no reason, but on the other hand, I don’t understand the point of him being there and her being drunk otherwise.
To move on to another random thought, the absolute worst thing to happen to Discovery since they time jumped to the future is personal transporters. I hate them with a passion. Characters just enter and leave scenes at the drop of a hat with a big sudden fart noise and some white static. Its extremely jarring. I am not easy to jumpscare but nevertheless felt jump scared on multiple occasions by sudden transports - mostly characters leaving scenes, too, which cannot possibly have been intended to be surprising or scary. Its a really baffling creative decision. Even worse than the times it jumpscared me is the times its ruined emotionally resonant moments with sudden surprise fart noises. I really hope any future Treks are either set before the invention of personal transporters, or at least have a less sudden and jarring effect for them.
I get the impression that the people behind Discovery just really like cool tech. Even when Discovery was set in pre-TOS era its technology seemed centuries beyond what it was supposed to be, and once they went to the future they clearly were having a lot of fun with technology porn. I’m not that big of a fan of it - I honestly think technological limitations are more interesting, even in a Trek setting which normally are fairly, “anything is possible if we can technobabble long enough.” Even in such a setting, having the base level of technology being lower makes it easier to write good conflicts, because if the base level is lower there won’t be an obvious solution and you’ll need the characters to struggle a bit, whereas personal transporters and spore drives and programmable matter and the like all force you to write problems that none of those could solve.
Moll and L’ak were… fine. I like them as characters and the choice to center the story on a tragic love story was unique. I don’t know that it actually worked out all that well, but I don’t mind the risk they took in doing so. I also liked that this fleshed out the Breen more, but I think the choice to have L’ak die wasn’t that great as we didn’t really get a fully window into their culture and exactly why it was so taboo to present as he did and why he chose to do it, and that would have been interesting. I would have preferred Moll and L’ak to have taken over the Breen together and then have L’ak be instrumental in talking Moll down - as it was I thought it was kinda anticlimactic the way it was handled, since if it wasn’t L’ak, it should have been Book, but it wasn’t Book, it was Michael, as usual.
It also honestly just felt kinda weird that L’ak and Moll were such huge threats, though? Like why are they so hyper competent? No explanation is ever given. And then weirdly enough, they went from feeling untouchable to feeling like not really a threat at all once L’ak died and Moll allied with the Breen. We were told the Breen ships were too powerful for Discovery to face head on, and the show did portray that, but Moll and L’ak using clever tricks to outwit Discovery was consistently more threatening and surprising than the Breen being super powerful but kinda dumb and Discovery using clever tricks to outwit them. As a result the early season felt really tense - and a little silly - as Moll and L’ak absolutely humiliate the crew, and the late season a bit limp, as Discovery humiliates the Breen.
Also completely random aside but I loved the library, but it was weird how sassy and confident the Library was about their abilities to defend themselves and then how easily the Breen were demolishing them. Did they just not have a plan? The library’s existence only really makes sense if they had some big gimmick to keep enemies away and I expected them to whip it out when the Breen attacked and then they literally had nothing. No gimmick, no even defenses to speak off, Discovery had to bail them out.
The last fifteen minutes of the last episode was pointless. It should have ended with Burnham accepting the Red Directive and disappearing. We can assume she and Book have a happy ending and have kids, we don’t need to see it. Literally nothing wad added by the epilogue, except a throaway line that claims Tilly is the longest serving tenured professor at Starfleet Academy, a claim which cannot possibly be canonically true. If we assume the epilogue is thirty years later - its unclear when it is, but Book and Burnham are only slightly gray and are still in active service - then Tilly presumably has been a tenured professor for less than 30 years. The EMH is also a professor and is more than 900 years old. Vulcans and Klingons both can live for more than 100 years easily. I simply do not buy she is the longest serving, unless 1) they are only counting from its recent refunding in which case its meaningless and silly to do so, 2) they only recently instituted a tenure program, which is also meaningless and silly if thats what we are suppose to think 3) Tilly at some point entered a groundhog day style timeloop and they are counting the ten thousand years she was trapped inside. The third one is my head canon.
But yeah, overall, I liked the season, and the last three seasons of the show did really turn me around on it. Its probably still my least favorite Star Trek show, but not by nearly as much as before. It definitely has higher highs than Voyager, and honestly probably is a better show overall, but I do prefer Voyager because its more my style of show. Discovery made a lot of changes to the Star Trek formula and honestly most of them I disliked and still do, but it founds its voice eventually and proved you CAN make a Star Trek show thats more action oriented, less philosophical, less grounded in reality, more gritty and grimdark, with a serialized plot focusing on one single main character, it just will take some time to figure out how to make that all work, and in the end, it will feel like Star Trek, just, different Star Trek that I like less, but I can respect those who feel differently. And none of its problems have to do with it being too woke.
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