At the time of writing Star Trek: Discovery sits in a nostalgic or antiquated mid-season break for season four. Sadly, I am left ambivalent about the remainder of the season. This is the first time Discovery has engendered that feeling.
I guess the question is why?
Peak Star Trek Discovery
I reached peak Discovery with season two of the show. I thought season one was a messy affair, undoubtedly due to politics during its development, but kicked into gear after its mid-season break.
Season two was a work of art.
It took the more kinetic, big scale and melodramatic concepts of movie Trek like Wrath of Khan, The Undiscovered Country and the original Kelvin Universe film and packaged it together within the format of a serialised TV show to almost total perfection. Captain Pike was astounding and literally set the tone of the season, the pacing was impeccable and the show never failed to look epically beautiful. It built and built, drama after drama, reveal upon reveal, throwing in the occasional cliffhanger to an epic finale.
Once they moved into the future it never felt the same, but season three had less of the problems season four is exhibiting.
The Future is Bland
An undercurrent to season three and four is the future just seems a bit bland?
It was possible to ignore this when the Federation was a failed organisation and Discovery was off trying to solve The Burn but it hits home in season four. I think part of the challenge is the visual aesthetic. I get they needed to show the future and adopt that into the visual design of the show, but they’re not making the right choices.
While the Discovery set gets away with it, the banality of season four really kicks in whenever the Federation organisation features heavily as the chosen visual aesthetic seems to be that cool temperature sort of hi-tech that lacks any sort of visual appeal. It’s like that 70’s science fiction aesthetic when everything is cool, clean and antiseptic giving everything a medical lab feel that leaves the audience with very little to be drawn into.
It isn’t very engaging, which is disappointing as if there was anything Star Trek used to nail was its visual design.
It’s so antiseptic you cease caring about the Federation as it feels like a bunch of people walking around some computer graphics and particular banal ones at that leaving only the occasionally scenes about its ideals within the Discovery crew to ensure you remember that it matters.
The only thing they’ve got right is the uniforms in S4, they’re pretty awesome, bringing back the bold colours.
Performative Lecturing over Conflict
This is a risky one as literally any criticism of the show’s content around representation and mental health can get you into trouble, even when you’re not criticizing the presence of those elements and are perfectly fine with their presence you just happen to think the writing isn’t very strong.
The truth is Discovery has fallen into the trap of doing performative lectures rather than delivering stories with conflict and / or consequences. We can take the episode S4E7 ‘…But To Connect’ as an example.
In this episode, the AI Zora on Discovery refuses to reveal some key information it has worked out due to it potentially leading the crew to undertake actions dangerous to them. This establishes a b-plot for the episode where Zora is assessed as to whether she should be extracted, etc. Literally, all we get in this episode is performative talking about how it is wrong to harm Zora and how it is wrong to allow Zora to give the crew a fail-safe that would result in her death and so on.
It’s effectively a 20-minute lecture devoid of any meaningful conflict for any of the protagonists or consequences.
All we get is a form of performative validation as if a form of mediation or therapy is taking place which we get to watch and say, well, isn’t that nice at the end. In a way that’s fine. If people enjoy that and engage with something in it that allows them to be seen, I get it, that is a positive, but let’s not lose track of the fact that it’s still weak writing. We can have those positive elements and have better writing, it’s not a zero-sum game.
So, how can it be better? Star Trek is replete with examples. In this case, we can take episodes like The Measure of a Man and Redemption, Part 2.
In The Measure of a Man we get the trial to establish whether Data is a being that can make his own choices rather than a machine that should treat as such. There is an inherent dramatic crucible and a conflict in this episode as it’s essentially a courtroom drama. Instead of lecturing to you, the episode presents you with arguments that make you think and that is one of the quintessential differences. Don’t just tell us what’s right, instead cause us to question what is right. Second, one of the main protagonists suffers consequences as Commander Riker has to act as the prosecution which forces him to argue his friend is a machine. There is literally 3+ levels of conflict between individuals and ideas in The Measure of a Man.
It could be taken as unfair that the Zora plot is a b-plot while the court case in The Measure of a Man is 100% the focus of the episode, so let’s consider Redemption, Part 2. In this episode, Data is given command of a ship and the conflict is whether he is up to it and if a non-android crew would accept him. It again presents a conflict as his first officer actively resists him, but eventually comes around. This conflict is given extra tension as resolving that conflict becomes key to holding together the security net stopping the Romulans and revealing their deceit.
These two episodes both focus on the intersection of AI and humans but they do it in a way that presents a meaningful conflict, in an interesting dramatic situation with consequences.
The Therapy Grind
One of the features of Discovery season four has been the introduction of mental health as an element of the stories. This is also causing some challenges, again not because of its presence but how it is done.
You need to be careful when you address the mental health issues potentially caused by the high-stress missions the Star Trek crews undertake because it can completely undermine the whole premise of the concept. Yes, episodes should occur in which the ‘fall out’ is dramatically dealt with, one of the best episodes continues to be Family at the start of The Next Generation S4.
What you can’t do is portray the crew as a slow accruing set of basket cases due to the work they do. The premise of the show is that they are protagonists up to the task.
Star Trek has experimented with the ship having a councillor before, but The Next Generation didn’t do it too well, so Doctor Culber also being a therapist is a good addition to the show, if used sparingly. It is a way to address issues falling out from key, dramatic events and to almost allow other characters to almost break the fourth wall when discussing such issues. That is a win.
What is not a win is the way the show seems to want to grind out the addressing of mental health issues over time.
It’s feels like Book has been in a b or a-plot every episode since his planet was destroyed dealing with the variations on the same issue. It ceases to be interesting and just gets repetitive. The problem it also has is by the time something big, eventful and fateful comes along born from that scripts’ work it feels banal and inevitable as they’ve ground out all doubt and excitement from it.
You have to deal with these things concisely and move very quickly to deciding action.
The a-plot of ‘…But To Connect’ suffers from this problem. Once we get to the big conference to decide a plan of action that may decide the fate of the galaxy we are presented with dramatic choices by Burnham and Book that have the shoulder-shrugging feel of inevitability rather than being exciting or bold. The reason for this is they’ve approached the issue way too many times over the course of the proceeding episodes. It was too much preparation work without deciding action so the deciding action becomes a perfunctory tick box.
It Feels Like Comfort Viewing
The risk with the direction Discovery is taking is it adopts the features of comfort viewing. Too many this might be perfectly what they want. I’m not suggesting it should be uncomfortable or traumatic but you don’t want it to become the spacefaring equivalent of Virgin River.
Make no mistake, there are now elements of Discovery that do feel like Virgin River. Stories that are nice, affirmative, don’t challenge you much, have good looking and likeable characters on them with no serious challenge. Now, I actually like Virgin River, so that is far from a criticism, but Virgin River is a particular type of show and I don’t expect my Star Trek to have too many of its features.
The problem as I see it is Discovery has dropped some of its serialised, hi-octane storytelling for more traditional Star Trek approach. Not completely, just a bit of a shift. This is fine in principle, but what it’s lost hasn’t been replaced with anything equally compelling as it’s replaced it with comfort viewing.
And, Finally…
I’m going to keep watching Star Trek: Discovery, it would take a lot for me to stop watching it. At the mid-point in season four, I am becoming ever more ambivalent about tuning in every week with the sort of excitement I did before as I am expecting it to be relatively banal.
The reason for this is the storytelling is weak.
You can’t just express a sort of validation through the story by things just being present and talked about, they have to exist within the crucible of dramatic storytelling and present conflict and consequences. You can’t look at issues too much over time without deciding action being an outcome. You can’t lecture to an audience you need to put insightful questions in the mind of the audience.
Star Trek: Discovery is currently falling into these traps, though I am sure many people disagree.