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 32nd 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 32nd 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 32nd 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.