What’s the Show? Star Trek: Discovery and it’s fifth and final season.
What’s It All About, JG? Well, it’s a quest, innit? The crew of the Discovery are sent on a “red directive” to investigate a Romulan science vessel from 800 years in the past, where they chance upon two couriers, Moll and L’ak, who find a journal. This relates to the Progenitors tech from the TNG episode “The Chase”. The journal provides clues and whoever can track down all of them gets the technology they used. This is, of course, awesomely powerful. Book gets roped back in because he’s on the show, the Breen get involved as the Big Bad and want to use it as a weapon, and the Federation want it to stop it being misused and also cuz they’re da best. The rest of the season is a runaround to establish who will get all the bits and thus the tech. After a lot of episodes of “find the thing”, Michael Burnham (who else?) manages to secure the tech but decides nobody should have it so casts it away. Then Saru gets married. Then we get a flash-forward to Burnam and Book being married with a son, and Burnam taking the Discovery to a new location and leaving it there for a long time to away a new red directive.
Why Did You Give It A Go? Because I’ve watched/suffered through the previous four seasons of Discovery – tellingly not written up on this very blog – so I thought I might as well see it out. Also, having been a lifelong Star Trek fan, having literally written two books on Star Trek: Voyager, and having watched all the other 21st century Star Trek bar Prodigy (which I’ll get to), I might as well.
Is It Any Good? It has all the attendant problems of every other season of Discovery writ large. So that would be a no then. It’s not a complete catastrophe but it’s also nowhere near being actually-good television either. This season has – much like the others – gone for an overarching plot. That’s fair enough, serialization is something Star Trek ought to be able to do at this point. Emphasis on the word “ought”. And what they’ve gone for is certainly a left-field choice – I doubt anyone had “Progenitor tech coming back” on the old Star Trek bingo card prior to the announcement that that’s what this season will be about.
And left-field choices are good! But it also reduces the entire season down to a straightforward quest story, which just isn’t all that interesting. There’s meaningfully only two outcomes – the heroes succeed in the quest or they don’t. And this being Star Trek, and moreover The Michael Burnham Show, they unsurprisingly do. There’s literally no tension as to whether they will succeed in this because of course they do. That renders the dramatic thrust of the season incredibly inert. There’s actually a lot of flash-bang-whizz going on across much of the season but none of it’s in service of anything interesting because we all know where this is going and we all know why.
What, in fact, the last season of Discovery mostly ends up being is boring. All that pow-zap, all that dashing about, all that frantic energy, just can’t hide how dull most of this is. There’s just not a lot here to be invested in. It’s not universally boring and a couple of later episodes do manage to scare up a little interest. The Archive is an absolutely fantastic idea and the episodes we spend there genuinely feel fresh and inventive in the way almost none of this season manages. It might be an idea better explored in another branch of the franchise but regardless, its inclusion here really (and finally) adds some much-needed imagination to what is a very literal season. The idea of it being both a physical location within the Badlands and something Burnham can explore inside her mind feels like its pushing against the boundaries of what Discovery is capable of and is very welcome.
Burnham herself remains exactly the same, which is to say not remotely compelling. I’ve made allowances for Sonequa Martin-Green’s acting in the past because she’s not always been saddled with the best material but there’s just not much of a sense that she can be bothered here. She pitches almost everything Michael does at the same level, which is to say just this side of simply repeating lines. Scenes of her having a heartfelt moment with Book or Saru have exactly the same emotional cadence as her admitting she’s unsure of herself in the Mind Archive and because of that none of it lands. Indeed, the scene in the Mind Archive where she confesses her doubt in order to win the next clue is almost laughably bad – she doesn’t sound remotely convinced by the words she’s saying and sounds like she’s repeating an exam answer that’s been learned by rote. There’s no sense of the character having any kind of epiphany or coming to any kind of realisation about themselves, it’s just an actor repeating lines. Burnham is the protagonist but there’s just so little sense of any actual character. We’re told she’s the protagonist, therefore she is. We’re told she’s important, therefore she is. That’s it.
There’s something about the look of the show, too, that doesn’t quite convince and in a very similar way. The Discovery looks like a set and rarely convinces as an actual ship. Say what you like about the Enterprise-D‘s carpets or Voyager‘s mobile warp nacelles but at least they felt like ships. The Discovery‘s sets are so wide and open the often feel like they’re just sound stages. Which of course, they are. And the inability of anyone to just walk to a room, rather than having to do that fast-beam thing, is just incredibly irritating. It might seem like a small point but it’s suggestive of the whole. It’s a stupid decision that looks wrong.
Salvaging anything from this wreck of a season is a struggle. Actually, even “wreck” isn’t quite right. Trainwrecks can be interesting. This doesn’t even rise to that level, it’s not interesting enough. The effects can certainly be praised though. From the dual black holes in the final season, to the Breen ships, to the Archive, the Badlands… Discovery looks pretty damned amazing for a TV sci-fi show. And while I don’t like the way the sets look, there’s no denying the time and money that have gone into them. Maybe they’re just not to my taste. But anyway, there’s a real sense of investment in the look of the show and that goes a long way to helping a scattershot season feel like it’s part of a more coherent whole. So all praise there, and well earned it is too.
That’s not a long to hang a whole ten-episode season of television off though. I’ve loved Star Trek all my life and it doesn’t give me pleasure to see it stagger and struggle like this. A lot of the creative decisions around this season are understandable, and even the jump forward in time from a couple of seasons ago was good because it broke free of the rapidly-overpopulated TOS era and moved us into something new. That’s great! The sad thing is how little of interest has been done with it.
In the end, the title of this show has become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Disco sucks.
How Many Of These Did You Watch? I managed to watch all ten episodes of the final season through gritted teeth. It really was hate-watching by the end of it, which I normally wouldn’t bother with but having come so far…
Would You Recommend It? Sadly not. If I had any hopes that Discovery might manage a late-in-the-day turnaround they were, regrettably, dashed. I wanted this to be good, but alas. Decision after decision just leave this season floundering. Take the Breen, for example. It’s understandable that the producers want to use an established race as the ones for Our Heroes to face off against. And the Breen are intriguing on the surface, all scramble-talk and with very little known about them. There’s a few hints and clues in DS9 but that’s what makes them interesting – hints and clues give you the space to speculate and fill in the blanks.
And what happens here? They’re reduced to being Just Another Race. That weird, disconcerting screech? Disappears when they take off their helmet. The way they look? Just another space-suit. And so on. There’s lots of dour military stamping about. We get a little insight into their structure and the factions within them but is passable at best – even the Kazon managed that and nobody thinks they’re a good model for anything. A potentially fascinating species are reduced to being Another Military Race. Riveting. All the things that made them interesting in the first place are dispersed in favour of easy shortcuts.
The cast aren’t doing the show much favours either. There’s a lot of talk around the show being “woke” and politically-correct and whatnot. This is all genuinely fantastic and one of Discovery‘s only genuinely progressive elements. Star Trek has always been weirdly gun-shy when it comes to gay relationships being on screen. There was meant to be one in First Contact but that got nixed, there have been a few suggestions here and there, and all of about ten seconds of Gay Sulu in Star Trek: Beyond but that’s pretty much it. Discovery though – that’s a different matter. We have a full, happy, gay couple in Culver and Stamets, there’s Trek‘s first non-binary character, Adira, played by Blu del Barrio, we have plenty of inter-species relationships… whatever else Discovery is, it’s not shy about wearing its progressiveness on its sleeve. Which, as I said, is fantastic.
On paper. The truth is, the core cast here are competent for the most part but mostly rather bland. Anthony Rapp, as Stamets, never seems to have progressed much past Joey Tribbiani’s fart-acting and the treatment of Adira is so precious that the character, and del Barrio, never get to do much with the role. It’s as if the producers worry that giving them any more than touchy-feely stuff, they might shatter into a million tiny little pieces. Which is a bit patronising.
Wilson Cruz’s Culver is a lovely character, and Cruz’s natural charm helps a lot here but there’s a feeling he’s in the wrong show. This is a character that could work alongside the spikiness of DS9 or the something-for-everyone Strange New Worlds but on Discovery he gets lots in the shuffle because a character like that needs someone to stand out against, and there isn’t anyone. Tig Notaro’s great, obviously, but she’s barely even in the show, David Adjala’s Book has been reduced to sexy-but-dull at this point, and Doug Jones’s Saru is in absentia for half the season. It’s not an inspiring bunch.
The lone exception here is Callum Keith Rennie, an actor who seems to have been in just about every American genre TV show there’s ever been, playing Captain Rayner. He’s an unbelievably refreshing breath of fresh air among all the everyone’s-terribly-nice of Discovery‘s crew. He has some of McCoy’s old sourness that just elevates every scene he’s in but importantly he’s not just played for that. The character is allowed some development over the course of the season, learns from some mistakes and, while still retaining his edge, grows by the time the season closes out. He’s a terrific addition to the crew that, frankly, they could have done with about three seasons ago.
Our two “couriers”, though, are just painfully clichéd – the Rebellious Prince and the nasty girl, all streaked mascara and baldy-dyed blonde hair like she’s stepped out of a late-90s nü-metal video (or at the very least has mistaken Run, Lola, Run as a documentary). They’re passionately in love with each other in a Bonnie and Clyde sort of way but without any of the things that might make that interesting within the confines of Star Trek. Their prior relationship with Book, when he was a courier too, amounts to little more than another method of exposition delivery and there’s very little spark between two characters who are so besotted with each other they’d give up everything. Oh, and Prince Idiot’s death in also incredibly dumb.
And that’s really it. None of these characters are really interesting or engaging enough to want to spend time with and the season-long plot is just a whole bunch of go-nowhere. It’s hard to screw up the logic of a quest plot and right enough Discovery does just about manage to get this right but none of the actual quest installments are very interesting except for the Archive and one interesting segment in a ten-episode season isn’t enough. The progressive elements in Discovery are very welcome, loooong overdue, and don’t derail the series at all but they also don’t really contribute that much either, beyond visibility. And don’t get me wrong, visibility is incredibly important but it’s a shame that it doesn’t actually amount to more.
Because in the end, the problem with Discovery isn’t that it’s “woke”. The problem is that it isn’t anything else.
Scores on the Doors? 4/10
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