Star Trek Discovery Next Week

I watched the finale of ST:Discovery Season 2 in a crowded departure lounge in Kathmandu. In cultural time that feels like an age and maybe a different lifetime ago. It was though, very exciting.

Where are we with this series? Season 1 was a very mixed bag, season 2 was better but flawed. Three seasons in and I don’t think the show has ever entirely found how to be as a series. Part of the issue was many of the ill conceived decisions made in setting up season 1. Cora Buhlert says it better in her review of the finale:

“In many ways, season 2 of Star Trek Discovery was a trasitional season that tried (and largely succeeded) in undoing the complete and utter mess that was season 1 before pressing the big red reset button and sending the Discovery off to new adventures in the far future, where no collisions with established Star Trek canon are possible. This is probably the best decision showrunner Alex Kurtzman could make, especially since the fact that Discovery was a prequel was always the biggest weakness of the show. But now the Discovery and her remaining crew can start over on a completely blank slate and hopefully have great and glorious adventures.”

http://corabuhlert.com/2019/04/20/star-trek-discovery-boldly-goes-where-none-has-gone-before-in-the-season-2-finale/

So season three is pregnant with opportunity. In general, the cast and characters is very likeable and it has been relatively easy to be invested in what happens to them. That is a huge advantage with any story telling.

Season 2 did a good(ish) job of extending the range of characters we interact with while retaining what is the most distinct aspect of Discovery as a Star Trek show. That aspect, which was present from the very first episode, was that it is the Michael Burnham saga. Although the show is named after the ship, the story arcs have each been ones that are closely tied to Burnham as a central character and key protagonist. Retaining that while allowing for more conventionally Trek-like episodes and letting other members of the crew have their own character arcs has not always worked. In particular, many of the recurring bridge crew characters are still largely cyphers.

We know from the ending of Season 2 that Season 3 has a new premise with Discovery flung into the far future, skipping over the time periods of other Trek Shows. The trailers all indicate that we are looking at stories set in a post-federation universe.

It would be really good but I’m 80% certain what we won’t see is a show that critically examines the Federation and Starfleet as entities. Discovery has dallied with this at times and then backed away. The Picard series got closer to the idea of the Federation as a flawed institution but the conspiratorial plot (evil fundamentalists Romulans conspiring to stop evil space robot tentacle monsters) undermined a lot of that work in a disappointing finale.

Discovery also had its own space robot tentacle monster as an explanation for its dark-side-of-starfleet plot line in Season 2. The sinister Section 31 turns out to have been manipulated by its own rogue software and that is sort of the way a SF-action story has to go if you want a big finale. You can’t really have an epic space battle designed to defeat systemic organisational flaws and fundamentally flawed assumptions that perpetuate a militaristic approach to what is supposed to be a quasi-utopian community of post-scarcity advance societies. It doesn’t even work if we try to make the evil AI known as Control as a metaphor for Starfleet’s/The Federation’s flaws, as the evil-AI tropes are all to strong. If anything we ended up with just a different Butlerian-Jihad ideology origin story for Starfleet to compliment Picard‘s premise for why the Trek-Galaxy isn’t as full as wise-cracking robots as the Star Wars-Galaxy.

I will definitely be reviewing Discovery Season 3. It has been a perfect series for episode-by-episode reviews precisely because it has such an awkward mix of promise and flaws. Likeable characters, good actors, some great visuals and special effects often thrown at inconsistent stories and under-cooked plots.

My Netflix account says “new episode Friday!” Practically, that usually means Friday evening in Australia and so I’m more likely to watch it Saturday morning. So expect episode reviews Saturday or Sunday.