Tag: star trek

I had said that with the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, they didn’t fail so much in execution as in full-bore pursuing a direction that just happened to be the wrong one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s the execution that’s off.

This was clear to me in the first episode of the current (and last) season of Discovery, which starts out in slamming Space Pulp fashion with Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in a space suit literally riding the outside of a starship while attempting to disable its engines to prevent criminals from getting away with a top-secret artifact. But then the scene cuts to flashback at a Starfleet celebration party and spends a bit too long on exposition before getting right back to where it was. Better direction – from say, Jonathan Frakes – or better scriptwriting could have created tension or irony by going back and forth between the two events, but this is an example of how Discovery kills momentum even when it is able to create it.

The incident stems from a double-secret “Red Directive” from the mysterious Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg), which apparently justifies going against all Federation protocols. Burnham naturally doesn’t like this, and has her team investigate what little they’re allowed to know. In the meantime the pursuit is hampered because the criminals have endangered civilians while escaping, and Burnham directs Discovery to stop and clean up the mess because after all, the Federation are supposed to be the good guys. (As opposed to certain other ‘good guy’ nations of the real world that I will not name here.)

Eventually Burnham gets Kovich to reveal the purpose of their mission: The couriers Moll and L’ak (Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis) had gotten their hands on the diary of a Romulan scientist who was a bit actor in none other than “The Chase” episode of the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard picked up the lead of his late archaeology professor and, pursued by Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan teams, managed to find a hologram from the “Progenitors” who were the ultimate reason why humaniform life is so common in the Star Trek galaxy, and who left their last message in hopes that their descendants could live in peace. And while at the time nothing ever came of it (I liked the reaction where the Klingon captain said ‘That’s IT??’), apparently this Romulan scientist was taking notes and managed to trace the secret of the Progenitors’ universe-creating technology. And obviously the Feds don’t want these two criminals to exploit the secret for themselves, much less sell it to someone really nasty. Whatever that secret is.

And while the story manages to bring back Tilly (Meg Wiseman) and Book (David Ajala), who turns out to have a family connection to Moll, the main guest star of this season so far seems to be Captain Rayner (veteran Canadian character actor Callum Keith Rennie) whose ship interferes with Discovery’s mission about as much as it helps it. Rayner is a combative jerk, and in this respect greatly reminds me of Ruon Tarka from Season 4, except that Rennie has enough charisma to make it work. Not only that, Rayner seems to be more moral and self-aware than Tarka.

So at the same time that Rayner is pressured to give up his command because his rash actions led to the aforementioned endangering of civilians, Captain Saru (Doug Jones) decides to join the diplomatic core and marry T’rina of Ni’Var, so before leaving Discovery he tells Burnham to find a replacement Number One who is just as much of a “force” as she is. So she gets Admiral Vance to let her pick Rayner. Precisely because he’s not going to be a yes-man, and also to honor Saru, who took a chance on her as an officer after she’d been that much more insubordinate.

All well and good, but just as the issue with Season 4 was that they took the premise of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and stretched it over thirteen hours, the premise here seems to be revisiting “The Chase” and going from one episode to over 10. It’s not bad so far, but I’ve been seeing almost as many chances for this season to go wrong as it has to go right.

Well, Star Trek: Discovery is setting up its fifth (and last) season in April, so it occurs to me I should give my impressions on Season Four.

In comparison to the previous series Star Trek: Discovery, the main complaint Trek fans seem to have with the last season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is that it only went for ten episodes. Whereas most people think SNW didn’t go on long enough, you can’t say that about “DISCO” Season 4, which went on for 13 episodes. And to me, it seemed a lot longer.

This is the problem with being a Trek fan who is neither a “progressive” nor a knee-jerk anti-liberal: Discovery isn’t BAD, certainly not as bad as certain pundits would tell you, but it’s often hard to give a damn about it.

Season Four reminded me of nothing other than Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or as my friends and I called it, ‘Star Trek the Motionless Picture’). It centers on a strange space anomaly that has the power to destroy entire planets and cannot be stopped. The solution centers not on violent confrontation but on scientific inquiry, exploration and humanist values. But it takes A REAL LONG TIME to get there.

If fans of the time thought that Star Trek: The Motion Picture was too slow and ponderous, Discovery Season 4 is basically the same story done over about 13 hours. Though not entirely. There are some interludes where support characters like Owosekun get some spotlight. One of my favorite characters, Saru (Doug Jones) has a chaste affair with the Vulcan ambassador from Ni’Var. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) decides she’s not cut out for ship duty but still has a role in the main story. Adira’s Trill personality/lover Grey Tal (Ian Alexander) is given a synthetic body (much like Picard’s) so that he can interact with the physical world, and while this story doesn’t go anywhere cause Grey really doesn’t have a place in the crew, it’s nice to see that this plot element was addressed at all.

While the focus remains on Sonequa Martin-Green playing Michael Burnham as Captain, Season Four is largely the story of Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) whose homeworld was the first victim of the “Dark Matter Anomaly” and whose grief is the source of much of the show’s drama, even as the DMA proves to be a threat to the entire galaxy. Ajala is good enough in this story that it would have been that much more dramatically interesting if Book had initiated the conflict in trying to destroy the anomaly, but he doesn’t have the resources to do so, so the story introduces Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) an arrogant scientist who offers his services, but is so high-handed in his approach that it’s pretty easy to see why Burnham goes against him, and thus it’s also predictable when his plan doesn’t work out. As such it’s a little difficult to care about Tarka even though the series does establish an effective back story explaining his motives.

Other than that, I thought the most interesting thing about Season Four long-term is how it continues to develop the independence and legal status of the Discovery’s now-sentient memory library and computer, Zora (Annabelle Wallis), assisted by the professional advice of Dr. Kovich (played by director David Cronenberg in what is probably the best stunt casting since David Bowie in The Last Temptation of Christ). I say long-term because just as characters like Kovich, Adira, Grey and Admiral Vance got introduced in the future timeline of Season Three and continued on, Zora is continuing to develop. In fact her continued existence is something of a loose end.

But it’s kind of telling that again, I found a “side trek” story of Season Four to be more fascinating than the actual plotline that was omnipresent from the end of Episode One onward. Season Three by contrast was genuinely dramatic even if I thought the reveal and the resolution were kind of anti-climax. Now supposedly the producers, taking the example of SNW Season Two, are making Season Five more episodic and action-packed, which would help. As I said about Discovery regarding Season Three, I like the characters and the actors but the writing falls down, and if you like the characters, that actually makes a bad story more disappointing. Let’s hope that they turn things around like SNW and Star Trek: Picard Season Three.

I took the plunge and got Paramount Plus (since I could just add it to my existing Amazon Prime account) and eventually binged Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season One to see if it held to the standard it had in the publicly released pilot.

Some impressions:

The girl playing Spock’s fiancee (Gia Sandhu) is better at doing Leonard Nimoy’s raised-eyebrow lift than Ethan Peck (the guy currently playing Spock).

If there’s anything I don’t like about SNW, it’s how they changed the Gorn into basically a race of space-faring Xenomorphs who cannot be reasoned with, which is especially odd because the one Original Series episode that used the Gorn (‘Arena’) started with the premise that they were a savage race but then Kirk found out they had their own reasons to feel threatened by the Federation, and the encounter managed to work out peacefully.
The security chief La’an (Christine Chong) is clearly the least sympathetic character, though I also think that’s on purpose. This is that much more obvious in the episodes where Chong is allowed to play against type.

Strange New Worlds was advertised as being more episodic (like the original Star Trek or TNG) in comparison to Discovery or Picard which have been focused on season-arcing plots. This is not exactly true. There’s no over-arcing “Big Bad/Bad Wolf” motif in Season 1, but there are several character arcs that recur over the course of the season, such as the courtship of Spock and T’Pring (which the audience knows will end badly), and the parallel flirtation between Spock and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), teasing what might be an interesting Season 2 with the villain played by Jesse James Keitel being married to Spock’s half-brother, the villain of Star Trek V. I mean, they could screw up that premise but I doubt they could screw it up as much as that movie did.

They finally gave a background to Number One (Rebecca Romijn), a character from the ’60s pilot who was so much of a cipher that the script didn’t give her a name other than “Number One.” Even in this production, her given name “Una” is just a synonym for “one.” Prior to SNW, fan fiction had assumed that Number One’s artificial identity meant she comes from some Human offshoot culture, and that turns out to be the case: Una is an Illyrian, from a Human nation that deals with the Federation but cannot join it because they use genetic engineering as applied technology when the Federation maintains a ban on it,due to the Eugenics Wars and the legacy of superman dictators like Khan Noonien Singh. What complicates things is that La’an considers Number One to be her role model as a Starfleet officer, but her surname is Noonien-Singh, which accounts for much of her character angst. (‘What’s your name, soldier?’ ‘Bill. Bill Hitler. No relation.’) La’an and Dr. M’Benga agree to keep Una’s secret but when it comes out, Una is arrested by Starfleet in a season-ending cliffhanger.

The engineer discovers that M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has been using power from the transporter, and the doctor eventually tells Una that he has a young child with a fatal blood disease, and he smuggled her aboard in the transporter, keeping her in beam-lock as a makeshift suspended animation while he works on a cure. He takes her out periodically to share time and to read her favorite fairy tale book. This mini-arc gets resolved in the most deliberately silly episode of the season.

Pike (Anson Mount) remains haunted by his vision of the future, knowing that he saves young cadets from a radiation accident but is then condemned to live the rest of his life in a power chair that only allows him to click “YES” or “NO” (because in 1967, the effects department at NBC couldn’t imagine the interface system that Stephen Hawking had access to by the mid-1980s). However he is not aware of how he ends up after that (which was the story of original Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’) so he assumes that that vision is the end of his life. He also seems remarkably willing to discuss this issue with other people, given that the events surrounding Discovery Season 2 are supposed to be a Federation secret on par with the existence of Talos IV.

Pike’s latest attempt to thwart this fate leads to “A Quality of Mercy”, which is probably the best overall episode in terms of the level of its stakes and how it reinforces both Pike’s sacrifice and the bond he makes with Spock. Unfortunately, Paul Wesley (guest starring as Captain Kirk) through no fault of his own, less resembles William Shatner than Jim Carrey playing William Shatner on In Living Color.

That particular episode also implied that Kirk was ultimately the better captain where it counted and that it was better for the universe that Pike didn’t save himself from his future. In Strange New Worlds, they’ve made Pike a happy medium between the American military mindset of Captain Kirk and the compassionate humanism of Captain Picard, but in this alternate-timeline run of original Trek’s “Balance of Terror” episode, Pike ultimately decided to let the Romulans live, when the failure of their mission in the main timeline was what stopped a general war.

I really like the cast, especially Mount. If I squint hard enough, I can almost imagine him as Jeffrey Hunter. However, Ethan Peck just doesn’t come off as Spock to me. He doesn’t remind me of Leonard Nimoy or even Zachary Quinto. As I’ve said, it matters less when you have new actors for characters the audience has only seen once or twice (Pike, Number One, M’Benga) and more when you have characters who’ve been around most of the series (Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chapel). Again, I LIKE these people, and I like what they’re doing with the characters, but they don’t really bring to mind the Original Series.

Strange New Worlds actually IS what Discovery was promoted as – an attempt to take pre-Kirk Star Trek in a new direction with modern sensibilities and production values – and while in the back of my mind it’s just not enough like original Trek to me, it’s good enough on its own terms to where it’s worth watching. Not just that, it’s better Trek in one season than half of Discovery and two-thirds of Star Trek: Picard. And now we’ve got the preview for Season 2, which looks to be much the same, only more so. Plus, the Klingons are back, and their makeup DOESN’T suck.

The main triumph of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season, after an “okay” first season and a completely unsatisfactory Season 2, is that it leaves fans wanting more.

All the more strange that it was largely the product of showrunner Terry Matalas, who was also strongly involved in Picard Season 2. But as Matalas put it in interviews, he thought that just as there was more that could be done showing Picard’s development in relative real time years after Star Trek: Nemesis, he also thought that that movie wasn’t a proper send-off to the Next Generation crew, and likened their reunion in this season to the final adventure of the original cast in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Which figures, because in comparison to the deliberately low-key Season 1 and the wandering Season 2, Season 3 Picard (like Star Trek VI) was a tightly focused narrative that retained action and suspense even as the threat in the story was only gradually revealed.

I have always considered Amanda Plummer to be awkward and irritating. In this case it actually worked. But she was good enough in portraying the pain and vengefulness of her character that Vadic’s death at that point in the storyline actually seemed anti-climax. That, and bringing back the fan favorite characters Ro Larren and Shelby just to kill them off as soon as they appeared were the only false notes of the season.

And then the whole thing turned out to be an intricate Borg plot, which explained a great deal about both Jack Crusher and Picard, but it also required a little bit more explanation that a casual viewer might have needed. First, the Borg villain was the original Borg Queen voiced by Alice Krige in the First Contact movie, as opposed to the Picard Season 2 Queen played by the late Annie Wersching, whom the crew picked up from a dystopian alternate history and who ended up merging with Agnes Jurati before the end of that story. Second, the reason the Borg Queen was so screwed up here is actually because of the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager, when Kathryn Janeway infected her with a terrible pathogen, which in the Picard finale is revealed to have killed most of the Collective as the Queen was forced to “cannibalize” them for her own survival. So really, this should have been a great tie-in to Voyager as well as The Next Generation, but according to fanzine articles, they couldn’t bring in Kate Mulgrew, or use Tim Russ for more than a couple of scenes, cause apparently Terry Matalas and the other producers just didn’t have the budget.

And then in only one year, Jack got through cadet training in time to join the USS Titan‘s crew, after they rechristened the ship the Enterprise (G). Which on one hand is cool, but on the other hand is the ultimate erasure of Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick).

But in the wake of this optimistic finale, and the success of this season, there’s a lot of buzz (encouraged by Matalas) to continue using the younger characters (with Raffi and Captain Seven) in a continuation series, projected title Star Trek: Legacy. I’d even heard they were going to try some way to bring back the martyred Shaw, who started off as the season’s by-the-book Starfleet bad guy but became a fan favorite once people realized he was right much of the time.

The fact that they could present an unsympathetic character and then round him out (as they did with Vadic) is a good example of how this season used all of its elements correctly, as opposed to wasting people like Picard Season 2 did. Using Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and her story arc to bring in Worf (Michael Dorn) as opposed to bringing him straight into the main cast, worked really well and showed how both characters could work in the shadows, as well as displaying their sense of humor. The repeated return of Brent Spiner as Dr. Soong’s last “golem” actually had a clever resolution to the Data/Lore conflict. LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge got to display more deep emotion in his scenes than he ever did in the whole Next Generation series. And this season, by extension the entire series, was a vindication for Jeri Ryan and Seven of Nine, who was clearly brought into Voyager for blatant sex appeal but (let’s face it) gave that show some much-needed edge.

The last couple episodes were a bit pat and “fan service” but they actually worked, and like The Next Generation’s series finale, created a satisfying ending for the main characters while still setting up possibilities for the future. And again, the producers really seems to be trying to make that happen, although the network budget constraints that killed some of their ideas might prevent “Legacy” from taking off. Still, it was announced earlier this year that Star Trek: Discovery is ending after next season, and the fact that Picard Season 3 was both popular with fans and a high-quality storyline should give more momentum to future Trek projects, as opposed to how the sails were deflated with the last appearance of the Next Generation cast in Star Trek: Nemesis. Not to mention, the other seasons of Star Trek: Picard.

I recently reviewed Star Trek: Picard Season 2 in preparation for seeing Season 3. Like a lot of people I was quite disappointed with the second arc’s arbitrary plotting and implausible writing and with this season, advertised as the last one, promising a reunion with the main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s hoped that things will pick back up.

Shortly after the events of Season 2, Picard has finally developed a relationship with his aide, Laris (Orla Brady) and is planning to go on a trip with her to a Romulan aid colony. But the episode actually starts with Picard’s former love, Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) in deep space, manning a starship by herself with apparently one other person. She fends off an attack by mysterious aliens and is seriously wounded, and sends a coded message to Picard, through his old Enterprise-D comm badge, in order to avoid the notice of modern Starfleet. Picard recruits good old Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), who confirms that none of the old crew have seen Beverly in about 20 years. Riker quickly decodes the message and finds Crusher’s coordinates, and decides to use his Starfleet connections to get them a ride out to the site at the edge of Federation space. This requires a bit of deception on more than one person’s part. At length Picard and Riker take a shuttle out to Beverly’s ship and are quickly ambushed but not before finding out that her passenger is her 20-year old son (Ed Speleers) – whom no one knew about. This raises the question of who this guy’s father is, although he has an English accent, which I think is a big clue.

This emphasis on The Next Generation is probably the direction the series should have taken all along (Episode 1 is actually called ‘The Next Generation’) but the series is still using Star Trek: Picard‘s main original character, Admiral Picard’s former Starfleet aide, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). She has become a street-level operative for Starfleet Intelligence and is shown trying (and failing) to stop a terrorist attack against a Starfleet facility. How this relates to the main plot has yet to be shown. It also has yet to be shown how the other principals of TNG are drawn into all this, although the navigator on Riker’s old ship happens to be Geordi LaForge’s daughter.

Terry Matalas was the main showrunner of Season 2, although on this story he seems to have done a complete re-boot, for instance putting the title sequence at the end (like on Marvel movies) and putting the secondary credits in the same font as the Next Generation credits. They’re clearly trying as much as possible to get back to the stuff fans liked about Picard and the Next Generation era, and so far it works, largely because of Jonathan Frakes’ swashbuckling spirit. It’s also got some of the more adult subject matter we’ve come to expect from this show and Star Trek’s other streaming media. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.

“It’s not my job to be interesting.”

-Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Picard, Season 2, Episode 7

They just had the first ad for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 last weekend, and it occured to me I still had to finish watching Season 2. I dunno. I don’t think I hated it as much as the rest of the Internet, but I don’t see how I could.

The best way I can describe this season is “all over the map.” It is not as focused as Picard Season 1 nor even as focused as most examples of Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise’s other example of serial season narrative. This might explain why it was harder to binge-watch the whole thing in succession compared to Discovery or Strange New Worlds: I wasn’t that invested in what I was seeing.

When I refer to focus, Picard Season 1 touched on a lot of things, such as the aging of Picard and the process of how a social-democrat Federation became a creepy semi-authoritarian state because it had been subverted by the intelligence service of a defeated enemy – like that has no relevance to current events – but there was a straight premise: Picard (Patrick Stewart) discovers that the deceased Data somehow has a daughter (Isa Briones) and needs to save her from the plot of a secret faction of the Romulan government. This quest ends up recruiting a whole new group of characters (and Seven of Nine) who seemed set up to continue their adventures in Season 2.
Well, they started Season 2 that way, with the formerly civilian Picard, Seven (Jeri Ryan), Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) and Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) all regaining their Starfleet commissions and coming together for a deep space mission with Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) that throws everything up in the air with the return of the Borg and a dimensional reset by a returned Q (John de Lancie). To set the universe back from the Human-racist dystopia it has somehow become, Picard and his friends have to use the patented slingshot-around-the-Sun method of time travel, ending up at a time that looks just like the present, apparently before the Eugenics Wars but at a point where the existence of the future Federation hinges on the mission of a young female astronaut who just happens to be named Picard. I mean, never mind that this can’t be a direct ancestor because she wouldn’t be passing on the family name. Unless she had a child as a single mother. Which is just the first of the cutesy ways this story attempted to dramatically link everything together without considering the consequences.

It would be one thing to start with the continuity from Season 1, and then find some reason to upset it. It’s another thing to throw everything completely out of continuity and then make increasingly strained attempts to bring in characters or actors from Season 1 who have no reason to be there. Like poor Elnor (Evan Evagora) who started this season as a Starfleet cadet under Raffi, became a Romulan guerrilla against the Human fascist timeline, then got tortured and killed no later than Episode 2, occasionally appearing as a flashback or hallucination to haunt a guilty Raffi. Soji (Briones’ character) has no reason to be in this story, so after briefly catching up with her in the first episode, the 21^st Century story moves to Briones playing Kore, a medical patient whose father is Brent Spiner playing yet another Soong ancestor, except that this guy is totally unsympathetic and ends up being the reason that Earth becomes an authoritarian regime at war with aliens – which was briefly alluded to in Episode 2 but isn’t really connected until the end of Episode 8.

To the extent that any of this connects to Picard or his internal situation, it’s in something that old Q ends up saying to young Guinan (Ito Aghayere): Humans are “trapped in the past.” She later tells Picard that this is a strength of the race, in that “you live in the past until you’re able to reconcile it, you do the work because you want to evolve.” In Picard’s case, despite settling down and regaining his status in Starfleet, he isn’t able to get close to his recently-widowed Romulan head of staff (Orla Brady) and can’t explain why. In another one of the too-obvious coincidences, when Picard’s team slingshots to the 21^st Century, he has them crash-land Rios’ ship at the Picard estate (which is abandoned at this point) to plan out options, but the darkened grounds bring up family trauma which he was apparently doing a great job of suppressing, because this was the first time in the character’s history that it came up. The temporal agent who is assigned to protect astronaut Picard (who is also played by Brady and who just happens to be Romulan) asks Picard if Q brought him back so he could confront these experiences, and in the final confrontation at Chateau Picard against Soong and a Borged-out Jurati, Picard remembers his mother’s tragic fate, which was pretty clearly telegraphed over several episodes.

Childhood trauma and emotional repression are important issues for Stewart, which he’s spoken about in his personal life, but are we really supposed to believe that Q pulled off all this craziness just so that Picard could learn to forgive himself and open up to love? Well, actually, that does sound just like the sort of thing Q would do, since at least one episode of Next Generation has confirmed that Q did feel sentimental about Jean-Luc. But those episodes were much better executed and didn’t take ten hours to get to the point.

There are great bits and pieces, like in Episode 8, where a de-Borged Seven of Nine, now more in touch with her emotions and empathy, is thus capable of telling Raffi that she’s manipulative and full of shit. But it was a bit hard to follow one thing in particular when we had characters like Renee Picard and Kore brought in one episode and then not used much or at all the next, to say nothing of Rios, as a Hispanic, literally landing in Los Angeles and getting tangled up with a young doctor serving the illegal immigrant community in this show’s most obvious reference to current events. Although that particular romance is probably the best acted part of the season.

And why did Q die? Like much else, there isn’t a believable explanation. Just as there isn’t an explanation for why Brent Spiner chose to let Data die but came back as another character and is supposed to be back in Picard Season 3 as Lore, without makeup and not much explanation for that. But if there’s a theme running through the whole series of Star Trek: Picard, it doesn’t seem to be aging and death per se. Rather, as one ages toward death, one has to say goodbye to the past, including all those people who were the main part of it.

Heavy, if not depressing, stuff. And now Season 3 is supposed to bring back all the other stars of Next Generation in a final goodbye to the series. I had said that Picard Season 1 was well-acted but not very well written, and Season 2 is that much more badly written, to the active detriment of the story. In both stories, they managed to stick the landing, barely, but one hopes that this coming season is a better journey towards the end.

So: As I was saying, the main problem with Star Trek Discovery in its first two seasons is that they made the decision to have its main character be intimately involved in the history of at least one Original Series character despite the fact that she was never mentioned before, and therefore Discovery had to be placed in the Original Series period when the stories, the technology and the overall presentation went out of their way to not look anything like TOS, even compared to the pre-Kirk series Enterprise. Case in point: In the Enterprise story arc that occurred in the Mirror Universe, they at least had some reference to the sexy uniforms the cast wore in the original “Mirror, Mirror” episode. Whereas when Discovery entered the Mirror Universe, the Terran Empire uniforms were all Italian Fascist chic, and the overall look resembled the Lady Gaga video for “Alejandro.”

Now while Season 3 did end up going back to that, namely to work out the fact that Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is now both a dimensional and time paradox, moving the series far into the future (far past even Star Trek Picard) is the best thing that ever happened to Discovery, because now they don’t even have to pretend to care about continuity. The old standards no longer apply. Which was very much the theme of this season.

First, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) appeared a year before Discovery in the future timeline and had all that time to get used to the new environment and life with smuggler-with-a-heart of-gold Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who taught her that the Federation had mostly collapsed after an event called “the Burn” in which most of the dilithium in the galaxy exploded, along with the ships that were using it. So even after Discovery shows up and she finds them, their main quest is to find what’s left of the Federation and help ‘get the band back together’, which I’m sure is going to be the continuing premise of Season 4.

In the midst of this, the crew finds the 32^nd Century Starfleet Command, led by Admiral Vance (veteran actor Oded Fehr) and discovers not only that the refugee Romulans fully reunited with the Vulcans (changing the homeworld’s name to Ni’Var) but the Andorians after splitting off from the Feds ended up joining the Orions to create “the Emerald Chain”, which was set up as the main antagonist of the season. This was one of the better decisions they made, because the Orions always had the potential to be the capitalist/pirate/crime syndicate villains that Gene Roddenberry set up the Ferengi to be despite how embarrassing they were. Unfortunately while Chain leader Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and her lieutenant Zarek had both malice and style, they were apparently too ruthless to be left alive.

But the dilithium shortage created a situation where the Federation’s mode of civilization is now more the exception than the rule in a frontier-like environment, and Discovery’s spore drive not only allows it to bypass the limitations of other ships but makes it indispensable to the Federation and the quest to discover the source of the Burn. The Burn really was a great device to change the nature of the whole Star Trek setting. Unfortunately, the revelation that it boiled down to a child’s reaction to his mother’s death made the whole thing sink like a lead balloon.

Yes, it did give the actors involved some great emotional scenes, but the fact that this event was what led to the destruction of galactic civilization seems more than a bit anti-climax. Although the Su’Kal storyline did end up creating Discovery’s greatest special effect, in which the holo-program Su’Kal is living in made Saru appear as a human, so that for the first time Doug Jones got to play his character without makeup, and he actually looked WEIRDER.

And then they just sort of wrapped the whole thing up a bit too neatly. Osyraa, the main rival to the Federation government, was taken out, and in passing they said the Emerald Chain was breaking up. And with Saru helping take care of Su’Kal, Vance gave command of the Discovery to Burnham. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Partially because it sort of confirms Burnham’s Mary-Sue status in Star Trek, but also because, contrary to the opinion that they’d been setting up this ascension from the beginning, you could make a good case, especially in Season 3, that the show was setting up the premise that maybe Michael WASN’T cut out to be a ship’s captain. Remember that the series basically started with an act of gross insubordination against the original Captain Georgiou. And in both Seasons 2 and 3, Saru experienced substantial growth as a personality and proved himself to be just as much captain material as Christopher Pike, whom Starfleet insisted on making the interim captain during Season 2 despite not having served on Discovery. Thus when the crew ended up in the 32^nd Century, they unofficially decided to make Saru their full commander, a decision confirmed by the contemporary Starfleet. Meanwhile Burnham had spent all that time before the reunion traveling with Book as a rogue trader and getting used to the idea of a life outside the Starfleet command structure. And as Saru’s executive officer, she was obliged to direct an away team mission while Saru was at Starfleet, and while she did an excellent job, in a later episode Burnham went against Saru’s direct orders, and when Saru found out about this and consulted her friend Tilly, she reluctantly counseled him to go by the book rather than let Burnham off. And the interesting thing is that Saru finally decided to remove Burnham from the XO position and install Tilly there, because he saw that there is no point in being in command if you have no regard for the command structure, and Tilly realized that better than Burnham did. So in flipping around at the end and removing Tilly and Saru from Michael’s path, I suppose Discovery has confounded audience expectations, but not necessarily in a good way.

Another example of the “I’m not sure where they’re going with this” is Discovery‘s continued attempts at diversity. They had previously introduced Dr. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his husband Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) only to kill Culber in Season 1. They came up with an ingenious method (using Stamets’ connection to the spore network) to resurrect Culber in Season 2, but after that Culber broke off the relationship since he no longer felt like he was in love with Stamets – he had the memory of their relationship, but not the experience of it. I thought this was an interesting angle to take with the character – if you die, is there a soul outside the body that just comes back if the body is restored, or is the person a purely material thing, and therefore Hugh is really not the same individual? This is a question that poses potentially disturbing answers (whether you’re an atheist or believer) and the show didn’t really get into it after Hugh volunteered to go with Paul into the future. They only touched on it a couple times this season, namely near the end when Hugh volunteered to go down to Su’Kal’s planet to help bring him out of his isolation. The relationship also ties into the new character introduced in Season 3, the 32^nd Century Terran prodigy Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), who was promoted as the first non-binary character in Star Trek. From a SF standpoint, Adira is more interesting in being a Human who is somehow able to host a Trill (apparently they improved the transplant technology after all those years) and a Trill who has a past life that is still separate and conscious – her boyfriend Gray (Ian Alexander) who had begged Adira to take the symbiont when he was dying. The two characters seem to be something of a primer for the audience in how to deal with trans people in their lives – especially since Adira is first introduced to Burnham as female, but then is put in Stamets’ engineering team and ends up confessing that they prefer to be addressed as “they.” (Apparently this paralleled del Barrio’s own decision to come out in real life.) The fact that Adira’s main connection to the crew ends up being the cis gay couple of Stamets and Culber also seemed deliberate. And Gray Tal’s continued individual existence is finally revealed when both Hugh and Adira end up on Su’Kal’s planet and Hugh can finally see Gray through the holo-program. And the fact that Gray no longer has a physical presence once the program is terminated leads Hugh to promise Gray that he will help find a way that he can be “seen” – another message to the audience that seems deliberate. Now, these moments are part of the great emotional scenes I referred to earlier, but they’re not exactly being subtle with the meta-text. Which just gets to how I have the same problem with Discovery that I have with Star Trek: Picard – I like the characters, and I really like the actors, but the writing falls down.

The main reason I bring most of this up is that the new parental relationship Paul and Hugh have to Adira/Gray led to an actual bit of tension between protagonists, when Burnham rescued Stamets from the Emerald Chain and he told her they had to get Culber and Saru off Su’Kal’s planet, and Burnham told her that would lead the chain to a huge dilithium source that was also the origin of the Burn. When she told Stamets that Adira had gone to the planet to give the two men radiation drugs to keep them alive, Stamets completely lost it, and Burnham had to subdue him then launch him in a pod towards Starfleet Command Center so that Osyraa couldn’t use the Discovery to reach Su’Kal’s planet. And while that case of Burnham’s ruthless on-the-fly decision making was actually the right move (and probably contributed to Vance’s decision to give her the ship), they’re making it pretty clear that Stamets hasn’t forgiven Burnham for it, and that may cause her problems going forward.

That and the rebuilding-the-Federation premise is what gives me hope for Season 4, but I’m still ambivalent. I’d said in my review of Season 1, “Discovery at least takes chances, and when it goes wrong, it isn’t because they failed in execution, it’s because they went forthrightly in a certain direction that just turned out to be the wrong one.” This show does take chances, but that doesn’t mean they always work out. This is part of why the show attracts so much flak, and given that it’s hardly the only Star Trek show to have bad moments and false steps, it’s hard to say how much of the hate is a politically incorrect fandom and how much is the ambivalent product.

It doesn’t help that the show’s semi-official nickname seems to be “DISCO.” Which might not even be the worst choice. If you were to apply the three-letter abbreviation format that these other shows have, so that the original series is “TOS”, Voyager is “VOY” and Enterprise is “ENT”, that would make Discovery “DIS.” Or “STD.”

Even so, Season 3 is certainly the best Discovery so far, again because the premise of kicking the cast out of standard Trek’s timeline eliminates the conflict they created for themselves in being so much unlike other Trek material. I’ve seen at least one YouTube video making a detailed case that the “Temporal Wars” referred to in both this series and Enterprise demonstrate that both series are in their own timeline that, like JJ Abrams’ Trek, ultimately has nothing to do with the Prime universe. This does not seem to be the canon position, but it helps me feel better about Discovery. At least with Season 3, there’s a better chance the show will be appreciated on its own terms.

Star Trek: Discovery came back for Season Three, which just ended. But before dealing with that, I realized I never did a review of Season Two. Which is relevant because it not only sets up Season Three, but also an even more explicitly retro-Trek project with pre-logical Spock, Captain Pike and “Number One” in the soon-to-be-produced series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The fact that Strange New Worlds is a more logical version of retro-Trek than Discovery is one of the main lessons I took from watching Discovery Season 2.

Discovery Season 2 begins with the cliffhanger scene from the end of Season 1, where the ship came face-to-face with the USS Enterprise under Captain Pike. At this point, of course, Spock is already an officer on that ship, and Discovery established that Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is Spock’s adoptive sister. The first few episodes of Season 2 tease dramatic reunions – Burnham with Spock, Burnham with Tyler, the Discovery with the Enterprise and Stamets with Culber – that do not immediately occur. As it turns out, the Enterprise’s Captain Pike is assigned to the Discovery while his ship is undergoing repairs and Discovery is still waiting for an official captain assignment, and Pike has to tell Burnham that Spock has gone missing. This sets off an investigation by Burnham that reveals her own childhood trauma and rift with Spock, not to mention the old Trek plot device of time travel.

And as we know, time travel becomes the primary focus of the season arc, as Pike’s mission ends up working backwards to learn why a “Red Angel” is appearing at pivotal events.

As good as individual elements of the Season 2 storyline were, the whole thing just brought the problems demonstrated by Discovery Season 1 to a head. I had already mentioned one of them. Rather than create new Vulcan characters as producers did with Enterprise, producers linked Burnham’s background to none other than Sarek and Spock, which meant that comparisons with the original material were inevitable, especially in Season 2 as they made Captain Pike a central character while somehow de-emphasizing Spock.

Going back to the old characters actually worked for the Abrams movies, because the cast was able to make characters that stood on their own as people in a parallel universe but were clearly intended to evoke the concepts of the originals. This was especially true with Chris Pine, who pulled off the amazing trick of creating a character who is quintessentially James T. Kirk without being a bad William Shatner impression. Because let’s face it, no one can do a bad William Shatner impression like Bill Shatner.

The producers of Discovery weren’t as lucky. I already said I didn’t find James Frain convincing as Sarek, even though I think he’s a good actor. However this season, I was pretty impressed by Mia Kershner as his wife Amanda. The major find of this season, though, was Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. That character had really appeared only in the pilot episode “The Cage”, played by Jeffrey Hunter. (They presented a heavily made up Sean Kenney to play the maimed Pike in ‘The Menagerie’, the flashback episode made out of The Cage, to help cover the fact that Hunter refused to reprise the role after deciding not to continue after the pilot.) I liked Hunter’s version of the character. He seemed to have an edge. In the scene where he’s talking to the ship’s doctor, one gets the impression he’s a nearly burned-out military vet who has seen some shit. And in the scenes where the Talosians are trying to tempt him, he seems like he would be just as happy to retire to a ranch and raise horses.

Like most of the Discovery actors playing Original Series people, Anson Mount doesn’t really come across like the original actor, other than being the leading-man type. But in this case it works. Mount is sort of like Chris Evans in the Captain America movies: He doesn’t even try to play anything other than the True-Blue Hero, and he doesn’t need to, cause he’s so good at it. And the fact that he is obliged to see his horrible future but chooses to suffer it anyway in order to save the timeline gives Pike a sort of tragic perspective that Hunter’s character didn’t have.

As for Spock, Ethan Peck is a good actor and a pleasant presence, but he is just as much not-Leonard Nimoy as Mount is not-Jeffrey Hunter, and in this case it doesn’t work as well, because Nimoy had so much more time to put his stamp on the character, and Peck doesn’t embody Spock nearly as well as Zachary Quinto. I’m also not quite sure why, but Discovery Season 2 made the decision to make Spock more of a device than a pivotal figure, as opposed to Pike or Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) or even Tyler. It doesn’t help that he’s very not “Spock-like” in this story arc, even if there is a reason for that.

This contrast between what we have now and what the characters were is of course going to be a factor when Strange New Worlds comes out, but there is at least an attempt to emulate old-school Trek with the Enterprise crew (and uniforms) that deliberately sets them apart from the design of Discovery, and that only serves to confirm the fundamental dilemma of calling this a Star Trek show. It’s not really much of a dilemma if you are one of those old-school, politically incorrect types that never did like Discovery, but it’s a problem if you actually do like it.

And a lot of what it comes down to is this:

You couldn’t have had a character like Michael Burnham as a star character in the time of original Trek. And that’s not because the producers were lacking for “diversity” or political correctness: The progressive tone of the original series is overstated, but it was real. The pilot episode did have Majel Barrett as the executive officer. The show did give us Uhuru and Sulu. The original series cast several non-white actors, including the great William Marshall as Dr. Richard Daystrom, one of the pivotal figures in Federation science. And of course, the breakout star was a not-leading-man casting, Jewish actor playing a half-human alien.

The problem rather, was that “political correctness” worked the other way back then, and the network executives fought Gene Roddenberry and his crew over a lot of their barrier-breaking ideas. They rejected the pilot episode character (Number One) played by Barrett and barely embraced Spock, so that Barrett got demoted to playing Dr. McCoy’s nurse and Spock ended up being both Science Officer and XO. I have no doubt that Roddenberry, DC Fontana or one of the other writers could have created a character like Burnham, but given what Nichelle Nichols has described in the stress of playing Uhuru, who was only a support character, it’s pretty much impossible that networks in that time would have cast a black woman as the star of an action show.

Then there’s the fact that unlike Enterprise, Discovery never even tried to establish internal continuity with pre-Kirk Trek, with sick bay tech more advanced than Dr. McCoy’s, and a ‘spore drive’ that was probably not imaginable in the ’60s. To say nothing of the fact that they changed the Klingon makeup yet again.

Now, maybe with modern attitudes we can show the characters that original Trek clearly indicated could exist elsewhere in the Federation (just as we can now create aliens like Saru now that Trek has an effects budget above four digits), but we’re still left with the point that for an unfortunate real-world reason, Michael Burnham could not have been a pivotal figure in the history of the Enterprise and the Federation before Kirk, and therefore in order to preserve the Federation from Control (and to preserve what’s left of continuity), the best way Tyler, Spock and Pike can honor her life is to pretend she never existed and never speak of her again.

The main attraction of Discovery – ‘what if we could do old-school Trek, but with diverse characters and addressing situations we couldn’t have mentioned in the 1960s?’ – was also the show’s main weakness, because there’s a whole bunch of reasons why the Original Series didn’t have these elements, and pretending that you can take a modern premise and put it in a ‘historical’ setting doesn’t work, for the same reason it wouldn’t work if you did a remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel scripted by David Mamet and directed by Quentin Tarantino. (Though I would pay good money to watch the result.)

It basically goes back to the point I’d made in my other two reviews: In going back to established material, you are inevitably dealing with continuity issues, and it defeats the purpose of saying that Discovery is in the Original Series period when it goes out of its way to NOT feel like it. Eventually the show painted itself into a corner where the only way to resolve the setting issue was to remove Discovery from the timeline altogether – which is just what they did.

I really wanted to see Star Trek: Picard and Season 2 of Discovery, but didn’t want to pay for CBS All Access, so when they announced their 30-day free trial offer, I jumped on it.

To recap the pilot, Picard was haunted in his retirement not only by the death of Data but the deaths of Romulans that Picard failed to save after the implosion of their homeworld. But then he is approached by Dahj (Isa Briones), a girl who seems to be Data’s offspring, and who is hunted and eventually killed by Romulan agents. And in trying to find out exactly what is going on after the fact, Picard discovers that Dahj was created with a twin sister.

Picard’s main staff, Romulan refugees, tell him that the Tal Shiar intelligence agency is only a front for an even older and more sinister conspiracy called the Zhat Vash, which is specifically dedicated to the extermination of all synthetic life on the premise that it will inevitably destroy organics. This conspiracy has reached into the highest levels of Star Fleet Intelligence and turns out to be behind the android attack on Mars that led to the Federation ban on synthetic life.

So the episodes confirm that the Federation, once democratic and tolerant, has become creepy, prejudiced and crypto-fascist, because it’s been secretly under the influence of a defeated enemy which has always preferred to act with espionage and skullduggery.

I’m not sayin’, folks… I’m just sayin’.

Having already decided to find Dahj’s twin, Picard is required to find a ship and a crew and ends up with a party who are each dysfunctional in their own way: “Raffi” (Michelle Hurd) a former aide to Admiral Picard turned burned-out conspiracy theorist; Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) a young scientist who Picard interviewed for her android research but who is conflicted about helping him; Captain Rios (Santiago Cabrera), once a promising Starfleet officer who quit after witnessing his commander commit murder-suicide, and Elnor, a young Romulan warrior (Evan Evagora) whom Picard had befriended as a refugee but was abandoned when the Federation withdrew its support for Romulans. In the course of all this, Picard, after decades of diplomatic service, seems to have bought into his own hype; several times he thinks that his powers of reason and persuasion will save the day, and he usually gets shown otherwise.

Star Trek: Picard Season One is a story about a familiar hero in sunset, if not necessarily decline. I found it to be often moving, well-acted, and usually well-directed. (It stands to reason that the most fun episodes are the ones directed by Jonathan Frakes.) However, I didn’t think it was that well-written. For instance when Dr. Jurati shows up at Picard’s home at just the right time, it’s an obvious Romulan set-up, yet nobody seems to notice even after the set-up later becomes more obvious. It’s a bit pat that all the supporting characters (including Riker, Troi and Seven of Nine) all have traumas that trace directly to the current sociopolitical situation. And the scripts completely fail to address the conflict that sets the story rolling: If synthetics are being hunted by Romulans, and are banned by the Federation, and there turns out to be a whole planet of them where Dahj and Soji came from, why was it necessary to raise the twins on Earth as though they were Human?

This leads to a huge spoiler that I will have to go into because it is part of the whole premise of Season One and will reflect how things proceed with Picard in Season Two.

In the Next Generation series, the main theme of Commander Data’s story lines were his attempts to become more human (for lack of a better word). This was sometimes thwarted by prejudice against him as both an officer and a sentient being. There was at least one episode where a Federation scientist attempted to procure Data for scientific experiments, which required Picard and his crew to defend Data in court. And after Nemesis (where Data discovered his ‘B-4’ prototype and later died to save the Enterprise), it seems that B-4 was disassembled by Federation scientists and and some point after that a drone class of androids was created as a labor force. And after those androids destroyed the Mars colony, the Federation outright banned artificial life.

This is the spoiler: Dr. Soong’s descendant (Brent Spiner) found an isolated planet and used it to create an entire race of synthetics who mostly kept to themselves. Their first contact with the Federation was aborted when Rios’ captain killed the emissaries. And once Picard and Rios reach the homeworld, the androids discover that there is an entire “federation” of synthetics who are willing to exterminate all organic life to protect themselves. And in order to protect this planet from Romulan attack, the synthetics must weigh whether to summon this force, knowing that it would kill the Romulans and Federation alike and thus justify the Romulan fear.

This is the REAL spoiler: after Picard helps resolve the final confrontation, he succumbs to his previously diagnosed terminal illness. But the scientists on the planet download his brain patterns into an artificial body. And before he wakes up, Picard has a final goodbye with Commander Data, who was indeed downloaded through B-4, but who asks Picard to terminate his consciousness, having decided that life only has meaning if it is finite. (Just as well, frankly: all the gold makeup in the world can’t disguise the natural sag of Brent Spiner’s face.)

This denouement creates a certain symmetry (it also explains the digital title sequence), but there are also a couple of themes in Season One that it cuts across. One, the prejudice against synthetics would have been that much more a source of conflict if Picard himself is now an android, but now that the Federation has exposed the Romulan conspiracy in Starfleet, it’s announced in passing that the ban on synths is lifted. Not only that, the show seemed to lean heavily into the theme of age and death, with a certain parallel between character and actor: Patrick Stewart is not terminally ill, but the show is promoted as though it were Picard’s last adventure because it isn’t clear how many years Patrick Stewart has left, either. And even if Picard’s new body is basically the same as the old one minus the fatal abnormality, the fact that he has a second lease on life means that the central message of the finale – embracing mortality – is somewhat blunted.

But overall: Not bad. This series has presented a new cast of characters and reset the table on the “Prime” universe (as opposed to the setting history of Discovery or the parallel ‘Abramsverse’) so things could go in any number of directions with Star Trek: Picard Season Two. And if Patrick Stewart has to bow out, the producers could always shift focus to Cristobal Rios, The Most Interesting Captain in the Galaxy.

I forgot that YouTube was given a promotion to stream the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard, which means I actually did get to watch it while still boycotting CBS All Access.

In this setting, which is in relative real time from the number of years that Star Trek: The Next Generation went off the air, the Federation is in a dark place. After the implosion of the Romulan sun (which unbeknownst to most people in the ‘Prime’ universe, actually created the Abramsverse), Admiral Jean-Luc Picard led a convoy to escort Romulan survivors to Mars, only to be suddenly attacked by a conspiracy of androids which destroyed much of the Romulan ships along with the Mars colony and Utopia Planitia shipyard. As a result, the manufacture of androids like the late Mr. Data is banned. Picard (Patrick Stewart) is haunted by the loss of Data (who actually died in Star Trek: Nemesis) and by the Mars fiasco, and has retired to live on his ancestral vineyard assisted by some of those Romulan refugees, writing historical analyses.

But when a young computer student in America is attacked by mysterious figures to keep her from “activating,” she experiences a psychic vision that draws her to France to seek Picard’s help. And what happens to her sets Picard on a quest to get to the bottom of a strange conspiracy. And in the last scene, where both Romulans and Humans are investigating a certain artifact, the conspiracy is very sinister indeed.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to succumb and subscribe to CBS All Access for this, but Star Trek: Picard is well worth the effort so far, combining the humanist values of Picard’s best TNG episodes with the skullduggery and intrigue that the setting has gone towards since Deep Space Nine.

At the last Star Trek convention in Las Vegas (where William Shatner was a featured guest) my sister and I went to one of the sales booths and bought the DVD that Shatner did on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “Chaos on the Bridge.” Shatner both wrote and directed this documentary, which runs an hour long, so one may wish to take it with some grains of salt. For the most part, he lets his subjects, the producers, writers and stars of TNG, do the talking. But Shatner, as he does, comes up with his own arc on a subject, and he sees the development of The Next Generation under original series creator Gene Roddenberry as a study in “the struggle for power.”

Paramount Studios, which owns Star Trek, had wanted to do a new series in that universe, while Roddenberry was in many respects out in the wilderness, not just because of the failure of his post-Trek projects in the early ’70s, but because of the “epic disaster” of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the original cast. As original series writer David Gerrold puts it, “they gave him this Emeritus status, and he was a has-been.” At the same time, the various executives at Paramount who wanted the new series were simultaneously at odds with Roddenberry and convinced that they needed him to guide the new project. There are a lot of poker metaphors around this process of gamesmanship, which is also a recurring element in Next Generation.

While Shatner doesn’t really go into his Captain Kirk persona, fans of the first series will know that Roddenberry often placed Kirk as a symbol for himself, doing scripts where Kirk was split into his good and evil selves, artificially aged and otherwise forced to deal with internal challenges to his power and command. (Ironic, given that Trek fandom also gave us the phrase ‘Mary Sue.’) There’s a brief bit where someone points out that in his prime, Roddenberry saw himself as a womanizing, man-of-action type, and so made Kirk out to be that figure, but in the late 80s, when Next Generation was made, he saw himself more as the wise guide to his staff, and so made Captain Picard more in that role, the traditional executive who dispatched orders to the away team. This less active tone was a huge challenge to the writing staff in TNG’s first two seasons, as numerous people have pointed out, because without character tensions between flawed human beings (which were a huge feature of the Original Series) there wasn’t much to go on, especially since the violence of the original series was also de-emphasized. Maurice Hurley was brought in from the action-TV genre as a de facto showrunner, and he found Roddenberry’s utopian concept of the new Federation “wackadoodle” but nevertheless saw his job as trying to maintain the show’s loyalty to that vision. It was only when the show started to lean against that formula, and take up character-focused episodes under Rick Berman and Michael Piller, that the quality really started to pick up.

To simply make TNG in the first place, Paramount had to produce it in first-run syndication, which prior to cable and Netflix was the best option for a series independent of the networks. As a result it didn’t get a lot of respect, and a lot of things, and people, fell by the wayside. Denise Crosby has talked about how she ended up quitting the show out of frustration (after negotiations that Patrick Stewart likens to the Israeli-Palestinian talks), but she also amusingly points out that the support staff was so meager that “I used to go steal food off the set of Cheers.” What I didn’t know was that similar conflicts had led to the temporary removal of Gates McFadden as the ship’s doctor and her one-season replacement by Diana Muldaur. But producers pointed out that things didn’t gell with her on the set, and Muldaur, who had been on the original show, tells Shatner, “when I worked with you, we had scenes, it was all actors… by the time you got to Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was a vast technical world that had some characters placed in it.”

Such observations make this a fascinating piece to watch. However, while Shatner confines his study to the first three years of Next Generation, he doesn’t always do so in the most organized manner, and while the one-hour length means that there isn’t too much to process, it also may not be enough in some cases. For instance, Shatner really seems to hit it off with Jonathan Frakes, but he doesn’t appear in the documentary that much. Moreover, the theme of internal power struggle is often suggested but never really elaborated, perhaps because a lot of the participants are alive and agreed to talk. However while they are not explicit, the writers and other collaborators of Gene Roddenberry are quite clear that he was suffering both physical and mental decline in his final years, and prior to Next Generation needed to kick alcohol and other recreational drugs. In this respect, it’s sort of like Shatner’s opinions of other people that he’s worked with in the past and who are no longer here to tell their side of the story.

However, most of the principals of Star Trek: The Next Generation are still here, and their story is still well worth telling. Chaos on the Bridge presents a second act for both Gene Roddenberry and the universe he created, and the drama of the piece is that, with all the things that could have happened differently, it’s amazing that it happened at all.