So I definitely hoped that by taking the weekend off from writing blog posts, I’d find the time and motivation to edit a chapter of my novel for my blogpost today. But, guess what, I didn’t. It did, however, accomplish my more reasonable goal of “giving me a break to respawn my creative juices more generally” so I have some more ideas about things to write. Instead of actually doing any of those ideas, though, I’m gonna just start blathering on about something I thought of ten seconds ago, and see how far it takes me.
Okay so in the process of just writing that paragraph I somehow managed to completely blank on the subject I wanted to write about, but I am pretty sure it had something to do with Star Trek Discovery, so what I am actually gonna do is just say a bunch of random thoughts about Star Trek Discovery until I either run out of thoughts, get tired or writing, or remember my original topic.
First thing, I’ve noted how much I’ve been enjoying S4 over previous seasons, and I’ve spoken as to why, but one thing that clicked for me recently is I think a big thing that helps is Michael Burnham is Captain now. Honestly I started off a bit peeved that Saru only got one season as Captain and now he is relegated to serene old master giving her advice, but he excels in that role, and even though its extremely awkward, weird, and unrealistic how the show got there, the shows narrative and characters and feel itself all improve because of it, so I can hardly fault it.
As to why this is a good thing, its pretty simple: the show has always been about Michael Burnham. Every plot always has and probably always will revolve around her. You can argue this is true about previous Treks to a degree - Picard features in most TNG episodes, almost assuredly more than any other single member of the crew, and is often the focus of at least one of the plots. Same with Sisko, with the addition of him playing a promiment role in its serialized plot and even being a sort of chosen one religious figure in the narrative, highly unusual for the normally secular Star Trek series. ToS heavily focused on only Kirk, Spock, and Bones, so again, Kirk is very often the focus. But the big difference with all those shows, and every other Star Trek show aside from Lower Decks (presumably, I have not seen it) is that the main character getting all that focus is the Captain. We expect the Captain to be the most important character in the show and in the setting of the show. If events are going to revolve around anyone it makes sense for it to be the Captain. Moreover, even stories which do not revolve around the Captain, it makes sense they would nevertheless be looped in - if they are meeting a new alien species, the Captain will likely be handling that meeting. If the Chief Engineer needs to go on a personal mission, they will need to ask the Captain’s permission. Its a natural consequence of a hierarchical structure that the head of it will come into focus more, and it feels natural.
But in the first three seasons of Discovery, our focus is on Burnham, who is not the Captain, yet the stakes are always sky high - a war with the Klingons, the fate of all life in two universes, some mysterious unexplained lights appearing all over the known galaxy, a rogue AI trying to destroy the federation, the fate of all sentient life (again), the fate of the precariously balanced Federation, all things which naturally could or would loop in the involvement of a prominent Starfleet Captain, but not necessarily a lesser officer. So they need to make excuses for why Burnham is being looped in. Its because she started this war singlehandedly (even though she didn’t), its because Lorca has the hots for her, its because the one sending these lights is her mom or her future self, its because her brother is Spock, its because the time travel suit is keyed to her DNA, its because she arrived in the future a year earlier and knows more than everyone else, its because she is a citizen of both Earth and Ni’Var and thus uniquely positioned to broker peace, etc, etc. All these reasons are fine in isolation, but when a show is constantly making excuses for why this character is the most important person in the universe, it begins to feel forced and stale - especially when the show also really likes having in universe speeches about how awesome that person is, which Discovery loves to do.
Season 4 fixes this simply by putting Burnham in the Captain’s chair - and more importantly, the Captain of Discovery, the only ship with a Spore Drive (for the most part, details unimportant). The show no longer needs to stretch for excuses for why everything in the universe revolves around her - she is by formal rank and strategic positioning one of the most important people, period. This subtle change makes it stop feeling like the writers really WANT her to be the most important to it being a natural consequence of who they chose to write about. Whats especially bad about this, though, is there really is no reason it had to be this way. The writers of Discovery said they wanted to do something different so they wanted her to have to earn her way to Captaincy, but like… why? And also, she didn’t? No other show required their Captain to earn in on screen - honestly feels a little suspect the first black woman Captain was made to. Plus, Discovery is not the story of her whole damn career - she is a Commander and First Officer on the Shenzou at the start of the series, literally a single breath away from the Captaincy, and her Captain even dies pretty immediately - if that wasn’t arguably caused by Burnham’s fuck ups, she’d have been Captain right at the start. You honestly would not even necessarily need to change THAT much - Burnham blames herself for starting the war, but we see the Klingon’s were looking for any excuse to start a war - its not her fault, and the fact everyone on the show seems to accept that its her fault is frankly a bit silly. She does commit mutiny, of course, but she is stopped before her mutiny actually has any effect. Later, she and Georgiou try to stop the war by capturing the Klingon head honcho, and Georgiou is killed, and Burnham in turn kills him, even after she explicitly had told Georgiou they should not do this, as it would make him a martyr, and like yeah, thats a bummer, but its also understandable? If you just made Burnham not actually mutiny but simply express her distrust in Georgiou’s more cautious approach vociferously, and then she goes on the mission as planned, she could have started out as a Captain who was promoted deservedly, but perhaps she does not feel so - like Sisko in Deep Space 9 where he is deeply conflicted about his inability to save his wife, just like Burnham would now feel about Georgiou.
In this version, Lorca could be an admiral ordering Burnham to do various things, or he could be someone under Burnham’s command simply luring her to the dark side, either could work, but aside from a few restructuring things due to these changes the rest could have stayed the same. Like I dislike S1 of Discovery and would like to change more, sure, but even these small changes would have, IMO, fixed a big issue with S1 where by it felt really artificial that everything in two universes revolved around the same person. But, I dunno, maybe this is something which only really bothered me.
That took a lot longer to suss out that I expected. I guess I’ll still plop out some other thoughts. I love Saru’s love interest in President T’Rina. They are very cute together and its also really nice to just see more of everyone doing non urgent things, so we can actually get to know them. I liked Tilly’s arc this season but hate that it meant she was absent for 2/3rds of it and presumably all of S5, all so she could be in one episode of Starfleet Academy which is already cancelled. Way to fucking destroy my favorite character on the show. I like the Stamets and Culber adopting Adira and Gray? plotline but it needed WAY more onscreen time. We went from them saying hello to you are now my child to we have an unbreakable bond and also your mind boyfriend is my child too in the space of like ten on screen minutes across like three episodes. It was not earned. Also like, it probably should be just Adira, don’t adopt them and their boyfriend, that makes it incestuous, okay? Like I’m kinda joking but its weird enough Adira is dating someone who was once part of them. As a cis man I don’t want to shit on queer stories which perhaps resonate better with queer audiences but honestly this felt kinda like it was a trans story written by cis people who don’t quite get it, and not the least of which because it ends up with what feels like it could be a confused metaphor for a trans person dating their deadname identity. But maybe its fine and resonates well with a queer audience my only bellweather is when I explained it to my enby kid they were like, “WTF thats super weird.”
Tarka was more interesting that I expected him to be but I am a little lost on what exactly he is supposed to represent. I initially pegged him as an Elon Musk stand in - and I’m not sure thats wrong - but his plotline of willing to potentially sacrifice billions of people to get back to his gay lover does not map to anything about Elon Musk I know, which, to be clear, is fine - political media need not be a 1:1 allegory - but I am also not really sure what we are suppose to do with that other than be like, “Bummer for him, I guess, but that doesn’t justify potentially starting an awful war and setting off a dirty bomb and potentially destroying two whole planets.” Like that just doesn’t feel like that deep of a message to me, and that could be solved if he is representative of something IRL, but I am at a loss for what. Honestly his desire to get to this perfect world felt like it was a model of American conservatives wanting to get back to the fifties, but the boyfriend angle complicated that, and it never really felt like it paid that off. Even when Book and Reno explain to Tarka at the end that the people Book misses in that perfect universe won’t really bring back the dead ones from this, because they are different people, that argument falls flat because Tarka’s dude IS there, or Tarka thinks he is, anyways, and it would thus be real for him, so at the end all I can really pull from this is, one guy’s boner is not worth the deaths of billions, and yeah I agree, but so what? Tarka would be more interesting as a villain if he had an or represented an actual philosophy of some kind other than “I miss my boyfriend and I’m making everyone else pay for it.” But I do acknowledge that there might be some hidden depth here I am missing.
Speaking of, I really thought the Burn in S3 was going to end up being caused by Discovery coming to the future, and was going to be a metaphor for running out of fossil fuels, but after watching Steve Shives review, he interpreted it more about disconnection from COVID, which totally does make sense for when it was made (and me watching it years later makes sense I might have more difficulty picking up on that) but like… I dunno. Felt lame that everyone in the universe got fucked over by one guy’s trauma. The show makes it clear we should empathize with him and not blame him, but I kinda would rather it have been written to not all be one guy’s fault to begin with? They tried to make it seem more systemic by emphasizing the Federation was running out if dilithium before the Burn, but like, legitimately, I think it somehow being either our heroes or the Federation’s fault and them needing to fix it would have been a much more satisfying conclusion.
Detmer and Owoshekun should get focus episodes. Airiam shouldn’t have been killed off - they wanted emotional stakes and they achieved them, but its a dirty trick to have a character be set dressing for two seasons, make us care in one episode, and then kill her off immediately. How dare you. Either make us care the whole damn time, or make us care and let her live so we can keep being invested in her.
Okay I’m done for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment