Science Fiction

This.

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 also reinforces that studios are trying to please the wrong people.

Peid. They are paid. Big ol’ circle jerk.

It's funny, your exact review is why some people dislike "new" Trek.

I've found Discovery to be solidly OK over the seasons, and find it's best when you can binge it so the bad episodes are immediately replaced by a new and hopefully better episode.

Think back to TNG. Yes the early season saucer separation was neat, and we'll all remember Locutus of Borg and the Battle of Wolf 359. But do you know what I'll really remember? How Picard becoming Borg affected him for years. When Picard argues in court "What it means to be man?" and if Data deserves personhood. Torture, ideals and the four lights. Learning to communicate with Darmok. The FLUTE episode!

These are the stories that made Star Trek, Star Trek. DS9, Voyager, & Enterprise would continue this trend.

Discovery? A little bit, but not really. Picard (the show)? Kinda but mostly no.

Strange New Worlds? Absolutely! Lower Decks? Again, yes! PRODIGY??? Amazingly, yes. It's for children so it's toned down but absolutely.

I don't think Discovery is terrible, but it's just solidly OK. They touch on some interesting topics, but ultimately they waste a lot of time.

Artificial tears

Certainly not on the plot.

I like the visuals, but the plot is almost at the level of Voyager during the screenwriters strike.

Lens flare

Bribing critics?

I loved the idea of the dilithium shortage, and the mystery of why was a nice touch. Until they solved the mystery with such an unsatisfying answer.

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".

I get where you're going but my favorite part or Trek is the exploration of different cultures and ways of thinking. Strange New Worlds is the return of to form I want while Discovery felt more like Enterprise.

I don't need my trek protagonist to cry every episode.

but it’s not painful to watch.

That's where we disagree.

Discovery is quite painful to watch.

Folks on the internet love to blame its unpopularity on gayness, or on a black main character, or plenty of other red herrings. You always see those brought up by people defending Discovery ("everyone who hates it is just racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever"). I'm sure those people did hate Discovery if they even watched it.

But plenty of woke progressives also hate it, for plenty of other, legitimate reasons. And its very annoying that most of the time any discussion about the show's problems get derailed by people who accuse any haters of just being prejudiced. Whether it was the bad storytelling, butchering of beloved races like the Klingons, an egregiously Mary Sue main character, the constant stream of manufactured melodrama, constant bickering and in-fighting among the crew, and the less-easy-to-pinpoint general way the show doesn't "feel" like Trek.

Discovery feels like an attempt to drop the "baggage" of past Treks and invent something new and bring in a new audience. Which might make economic sense, but feels like a slap in the face to many lifelong Trek fans who love the old series.

Not angry, just isn't star trek to me. In my mind star trek, for each episode has: an external threat or issue the crew has to overcome and an internal conflict or issue to overcome. Neither will have any obvious solution at the start and are often very difficult topics or philosophical in nature. The crew then solves these creatively and reflect on their situation a little. Very seldom are there multi-episode story archs, but even those fairly closely follow that formula.

I was excited at first because the Klingon wars with modern CG sounded like fun. But star trek isn't about that in the end. Even when war is at the forefront of a story in there, it is still often more about resolving it rather than indulging in it.

Not to mention (but this is an issue of a lot of modern SciFi) why in the world is everything so darn dark in that show? Why is everything inside the ships so black and shiny? Don't like that design at all. Difficult to watch and just far too depressing. Star Trek is hopeful, not doom and gloom to me. It is about the best of humanity, even when they struggle.

It's not the gayness that people don't like about it. I wasn't even aware that there was all that much gayness in it, and most of what I know about the show is what people say when complaining about it since I don't watch it.

While Trek is often like a stage show with some over the top performances, Discovery went the extra mile and made the primary lead into space Les Mis. I blame the writers though, since the problem was the plot not justifying the performance.

The trek boards on reddit were seething when disco came out because 'how dare a black woman be in a leading role in trek' and 'I can't relate to the show any more now' and 'why are there so many females on the bridge'.

There was a lot of very bitter 'it's just not trek' from folk with poor reasonings as to why too.

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.