• 0 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle















  • im not sure how one is slapped across the face with normalcy but if you’re saying discovery didnt go far enough with the barely-disguised left wing messaging we usually see in star trek i agree wholeheartedly

    In fairness, that messaging has taken rather a back seat ever since Trek became big, probably because the networks see it as a cash cow, and no longer give it liberty to take the same risks.

    DS9 only got as far as they did pushing the boundary because Voyager had most of the attention, for example.

    You don’t really see any new Trek show pushing the boundary quite like TOS did back in the day, to the point where it was very nearly cancelled outright due to the outrage it produced. Roddenberry even wanted to add an LGBT character to it at some point, but it was shot down by the other producers. Compared to TOS, Discovery’s representation and messaging is almost contemporary, with relatively little boundary-pushing.

    Compare to that to the Orville, which doesn’t have that baggage by virtue of being new, and relatively unknown, so they can get away with more on-the-nose messaging a good bit more without getting into trouble. There’s no established IP and format that the network would prefer that they keep to, or stay uncontroversial so it’s still palatable to wider audiences.


  • Disco had a lot of flaws, and most of them were the same flaws we saw in Picard: the writers just couldn’t write full season plot arcs that were satisfying and believable. This is made worse because each season had to raise the stakes, to the point where it just got kinda exhausting. Meanwhile the show just took itself way too seriously, without really earning my emotional investment.

    Some of the were exacerbated by the production issues that happened in the early seasons of the show, too.

    They went through a bunch of different showrunners/producers in that time, and it shows. Much of Seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery felt like four different shows all overlapping with each other, which did not help in the slightest. It started to find its footing in Season 3, but after that was also when CBS took it off of Netflix, which also made it harder to watch, unless you were willing to subscribe to another service (that might not even be available in your country) for the one show.

    It might have been more interesting if it had stabilised itself and found its footing early on, but alas. On the other hand, it being what was basically an experimental testing-ground for a bunch of different concept gave us the short treks, Strange New Worlds, and a few other shows besides, so can’t fault it that badly.