At least give lower decks a try if you’ve seen the rest of trek, the references alone make it fun to watch. It’s AU it doesn’t taint the cannon but it’s still trek and a good time

Picard is elder abuse and I'm sticking to it.

Sure, the other Treks have had major threats to the universe, but they were being slow-rolled over a long season, or sometimes multiple seasons. They had room to breathe and do episodes that didn't advance the plot.

As a usual defender of Discovery - I absolutely agree here. CBS clearly wanted to do a Battlestar Galactica, just in case Star Trek was over.

As much as I like Discovery, I'll admit I'm sure I would like it more if they had settled down from the constant universe ending a bit more often.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give to this comment.

The only addition I have is the glorification/growth of Section 31. They were introduced as the baddies because they are the antithesis of what the Federation is. As a foil they're at least a gateway to interesting variations on "do the ends justify the means" and ""are short term solutions acceptable while sacrificing long term ones". Which the Federation classically would answer with a resounding "No".

But sci-fi Black Ops is "cool" and The Expanse was popular so lets get on that bandwagon apparently. (I love The Expanse, but different things should be different.)

I had to stop watching when an alien got really sad that one time and that caused all the dilithium crystals in the galaxy to blow up. It was just... Dumb.

I feel like one of the main issues with Discovery is also that it's much more serialised, and more compact, to its detriment.

There wasn't an ambiguous downtime between adventures, or for things to happen off-screen, everything happened one after the other. We didn't have space to develop and explore the characters, basically everything was plot, which made the emotional parts feel unearned.

The characters were rarely more than the bare minimum to enable said plot.

It hugely needed downtime it didn't really get, and could have benefited from stretching out either the seasons or the episodes out to have them be more fleshed out and normal, instead of dealing with crisis after crisis after crisis. In all of three seasons, we had about a single segment of episode where they had any memorable recreation at all.

There was never an equivalent of the "The Doctor is a good singer, Worf hates children, Spock likes chess" moments for the Discovery characters to expand into between the big plot points. They don't really have long-term flaws, or room to grow for the most part.

Discovery also fails because that lack of competence is everywhere in the crew.

I'd actually disagree with you on discovery showing a lack of competence. If anything, besides the attitude, it felt more like the characters were too competent. They didn't have varied, specific flaws and weaknesses that made them seem more human, instead being universally omnicompetent.

Even TNG, otherwise a shining bastion of competency, worked best when the characters had individual flaws and weaknesses that they collectively mitigated by relying on each other, rather than everyone being perfect and good at everything.

Discovery lacks that kind of deferring to better expertise, and often comes across as Burnham does everything. Except when she's coming up with a plan that will fix everything, there was barely any consultation, or back and forth. There wasn't really ever a "I can think of something that could help, but have no idea how to execute it, anyone know how we might pull it off?", or "That's not a bad thought, but if we do it this other way, it might be better".

Absolutely. In fact they definitely had wars about it.

While I do generally enjoy discovery, I do think It's still pretty flawed. Not because of the spore stuff, but because of the way that they have to deal with so many "danger to the entire galaxy/universe/multiverse" type events back to back. Like, doing a few is fine, I generally enjoyed the xindi arc in Enterprise for example, but having so many starts to feel very forced after awhile.

I especially find that bit with the spore energy extractor in the mirror universe that could kill all life in the multiverse if not stopped jarring, because, if you have a potentially limitlessness number of alternative timelines, and the massive expanse of space, to develop that tech in, the odds that nobody else ever built one of these drops to essentially zero, except that the existence of the plot at all implies nobody else ever has.

I personally liked it a lot. I liked the fact that it broke from the style of the 90's Trek series and did something fresh. But that is exactly what a lot of Trek fans hated.

I love Discovery. You should definitely give it a chance.

It's not perfect, and some of the complaints in this thread are completely valid, but I attribute the ferocity of the hate it gets more to the fact that it brought Trek back as a series after a very long hiatus, and took some pretty big swings as a result.

I was around when DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise were the new shows that "just didn't understand Star Trek," so from my perspective it's all very cyclical. Trek fans, as with most long-standing fandoms, don't all handle change very gracefully.

Honestly, it's just a different tone. That's about it. You should definitely watch it and decide for yourself whether you enjoy it, don't let other people online decide for you.

I will say that the first season is a little rough around the edges but all Star Trek shows are. It gets better as it goes on. Tone, acting, writing. It all takes a slight tonal shift in the second season. At least there's only 13ish episodes as opposed to the 24 of older shows.

It's not wrong per se, it's just different. I don't particularly like Discovery and Picard, but they're ok. They don't have the same monster of the week approach as the others, and a lot of the other stuff has already been discussed here; lack of development of the crew and their relationship, the main character is constantly on focus while everyone else in the bridge is in rear view, no breathing room for proper character development, the orcs/klingons, etc.

I would rather watch Lower Decks, Prodigy or even The Orville. They're closer to what I like about Star Trek (though The Orville takes a bit to get there).

Remember when Spock tried to kill Kirk because he was sexually frustrated?

Shouldn't that last one say USS Voyager NCC-74656?

strong Sealab 2021 but live action vibes

Now I want to see survey of people who loved Sealab 2021 and are apologists for Discovery. The venn diagram might just be a perfect circle...

I don't, myself, disagree with any of the many complaints people have about Disco. My counter argument is just - I still had fun.

You've given me this revelation that I defend Sealab 2021 exactly the same way...