Star Trek: Discovery - a Biased Review

After watching season one of Star Trek: Discovery the year it came out, I gave up on the show.

Lots of crying for a science fiction show, among many other problems.

After seeing several suggested clips on YouTube lately, I decided to give it another chance, so I started watching season two.

Still lots of crying, in every episode. Though there does appear to be a proper story to follow now, though it is slightly inept, pedantic, confused, and very hard to follow in places due to the way its been cut and edited. They also seem to be leaving out key bits of dialogue in places, forcing a viewer to either make certain assumptions to make the story flow or remain somewhat confused while the show moved past a key scene resulting in a lack of understanding for what follows.

It seems to me that the best way to watch this show is to turn off your mind and just let it flow. Don't try to absorb, analyze, understand or comprehend it. Just watch it.

So now it is background noise while I'm working from home.

That said, they take a great many liberties with established cannon and I find it disconcerting in many cases. They're effectively erasing or permanently modifying everything we've come to know about Star Trek since the 60's. I find myself annoyed and put-off by that.

I understand the need for them to create something new to garner and hold an audience, but the wholesale destruction of everything that came before it seems wasteful and short-sighted, and as has been seen over the last couple years has earned the ire of many fans of these shows as a whole. The other new series at least had the fore-site to take place in a future period, after the other shows we've all come to enjoy have ended. Discovery has inserted itself into an early Trek timeline, and introduces inconsistencies and issues into the established timeline as I mentioned earlier.

Also, there is an inordinate amount of crying by multiple characters. Something I find disconcerting actually because they use that so often it becomes meaningless and ineffective.

And of course season two of the show is heavily and repeatedly involved with one of the old Trek crutches: time travel. Whenever the previous Series' wrote themselves into a corner, they invoked time travel or another form of time manipulation to get out of it. Yes there were a couple good stories involving the use of time travel, but it seems Trek in general falls back on that trope again and again. Not saying it is a bad thing, but its been done so often as to become expected. Star Trek has gone from showing us all a possible Universe to showing us the different ways what we already know and have seen could play out.

That said, all of the different and varied changes to the timeline/s that Discovery heaps on us seemingly every week are a bit much to process and keep track of. Watching most the season two episodes, I find myself spending time trying to reconcile the differences between what I've seen or am currently seeing with what I already know as established Trek history. And while I'm trying to reconcile what they are showing me with what I already know from other shows, they're also effectively changing Trek history from what was already established in other previous shows, making it all that much harder to reconcile.

As I said earlier, I find it simpler to just not think about the show while I'm watching it. I treat this show as yet another alternative timeline in the Trek universe, having no effect or consequence on the other shows that I've seen in years past.

That said, I do enjoy some of the leaps in technology they have made since Enterprise and the Original Series, and from what I've seen in some of the YouTube clips i mentioned earlier, they're going to easily surpass any technology that has been seen in any Trek show or movie prior to it.

So now I find that at least for season two I do generally enjoy the show, though I must repeatedly remind myself that there are no consequences to come from it. It doesn't effect or change anything that came before it unless I allow it to in my mind. Much like the newer Star Trek movies are treated as the 'Kelvin Timeline', in my mind Discovery has become its own timeline and is writing its own parallel but separate history in the Star Trek Universe. That's the only way I can get this show to coalesce and co-exist with the other shows and movies that came before it in my mind.

UPDATE: a couple days later... I'm about finished with Season 3, and I must say that there are several parallels and mirrors of the Enterprise series episodes, at least the latter couple seasons seem to be that way. That said, I see the last season as more entertaining than the first two.