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.