Yeah, because it wasn't Star Trek.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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The disconnect between the critical rating and the audience rating just reinforces for me that critics are out of touch and can't be trusted.
I don't think the 'audience' ratings can be fully trusted though. Any new film or TV show these days with prominent women, minority or LGBTQ characters (Discovery has all) gets routinely review-bombed by alt-right participants who likely haven't even watched it - that's just a fact of these ratings. My anecdotal discussions with irl Trek fans didn't find the same antagonism to Discovery that you find online.
Discovery wasn't the best of Star Trek, and I ended up switching off early Season 4, but much of the early hostility towards it was either that sort of bad faith, or focused on trivia (which leads me to wonder if it was just cover for the same - I cannot get my head around people who refused to watch because they didn't like the Klingon prosthetics).
Season 1 was solid, Season 2 was arguably even better (although owed a lot off that to Captain Pike). Season 3 had great promise in its premise but failed to realise it's potential, and then Season 4 just felt lost.
It wasn't just the prosthetics that were awful, Klingon culture was completely different too. Why even call them Klingons?
The shame is that the ending of Season 4 might be one of the most ' Star Trek' moments in the franchise. But the lead up to was so generic that many didn't make it that far.
Wait, is Hollywood starting to realize that critics don't pay their bills, the viewing audience pays their bills?
Each episode of Star Trek: Discovery is rumored to cost up to $10 million per episode.
What the hell were they spending this money on???
Lens flare
The 30th century thing of rebuilding a fallen Federation was a somewhat interesting prospect, but I think they chose the wrong angle of going at it. But I don't know what I would have done differently, because I'm not a good enough writer to have a decent opinion on it.
I enjoyed the federation reborn as well. I have an opinion.
The writers were so busy patting each other on their backs with how "deep" they were being with symbolism about the importance of communication, that they went and made the whole cause of the burn a child being lonely on some planet somewhere so they could twist the burn into a big symbolic point about how "if only we had been a little better" something like it would never have happened.
It was so fucking telegraphed that I saw it coming episodes away and was rolling eyes every time the show referenced this symbolic circle jerk.
No. Shit happens. The universe doesn't care, and it WILL fuck your shit up, I would have been far more impressed with the crew rebuilding the federation after an inevitable natural disaster, making a point of life finding a way despite the random crap reality throws at us, and how communication and understanding is one of the things that help us do that.
Star Trek is supposed to be optimistic, not delusional, and as such the core message of that season rings hollow. It's too hopeful. Instead of "we might not be perfect, and we might not know what's coming, we know we are enough" it was "we're nearly there, we just need one more step to be perfect, and nothing bad will ever happen because of this ever again".
Unpopular opinion time:
Both Star Trek and Star Wars need to kick bricks. It’s time for some new IP. Those stories have been told time and again, let it rest and bring in some fresh new stories with new IP.
The Expanse was fantastic. I'd love to see the rest of the books adapted some day...
As for other sci-fi, my god there's so much good shit in literature that will never be seen on a screen.
The Three Body Problem is getting several adaptations, one of which might or might not fix my issues with that series, but it does have conceptual potential.
More seasons than TOS, TAS, Enterprise, or Picard.
I didn't watch the whole show; it didn't really seam to know what it wanted to be, or how to get there. But I watched waaaay more of Discovery than Picard. Picard was awful, but it doesn't seem to get as much flak as Discovery.
Do you not have the belief that you should watch every bit of canon Star Trek that's available, no matter what? I do. It doesn't take much time. Now that Picard 3 is out, I'm going to do a fast rewatch of all three seasons and see if I can understand it better, because I sure as hell didn't the first time through S1 & 2.
I don't think that there really can be cannon for media projects with this many different leaders at the helm, made so far apart, and without a strong source material. There's so much media to watch out there that if I don't like a show, I am not going to watch it just because I liked other shows with a similar naming scheme.
There is also a lot of time travel and "mirror universing" in Trek, so whatever could be considered cannon might not have happened in the same timeline as other events that are also considered cannon.
Picard had the retrospect to notice that fans didn't want new experiments with old figures and then they did their latest season and it was brilliant. The rest of Picard was very decidedly Trek but so awfully slow paced that I can't blame anyone for giving up on it.
That's the power of math, people!!!!