I know I would hate This is Us. The trailers show a bunch of face actors disgorging feelings onto each other. The plot elements exist only to generate intense emotional communication opportunities for pairs of characters. Barf.
This may be unfair to This is Us; I haven’t seen it, but I have seen Star Trek Discovery and this is exactly what it’s like.
It’s so bad, I can’t bring myself to rewatch the final episode so as to support my assertions. It would be too much to bear a second viewing.
I seem to remember hearing that Star Trek: The Next Generation had a team of super-nerd, Star Trek geeks fact functioning as a sort of a quality control committee. Well, there is no such committee on Discovery.
The writers of this latest Star Trek installment are not governed by precedents established by previous Star Treks. It’s not even governed by the universal principles of good writing or those of common sense.
Should the Admiral or the Captain sacrifice their life for the good of the ship? Hmmm–obviously there is no Star Fleet protocol to help make this decision–the only thing we can do is have a discussion in which we set out our emotional appeals in the hopes of the other seeing the power of our emotional position. This all while the ship is in imminent peril.
Oh, let’s not forget the context of this conversation. The ship is in the middle of a fight for its life. Why are the admiral and the captain the only two people who can work on the little problem of an unexploded photon torpedo stuck in the hull? Aren’t their thousands of guys in red shirts that can do this? At least have some engineer there to work on the door. Barf.
Oh, and where do faulty photon torpedos come from? Does that make sense? This plot element is great for a WWI movie, or Gilligan’s Island, but not the Star Trek Universe. The whole plot is like this. Contrived, contrived, contrived.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”There are all sorts of peril in Star Trek Discovery, but despite the urgency of the situation, there’s always time to stand face to face and explore feelings. #StarTrek #Discovery #StarTrekDiscovery” quote=”There are all sorts of peril in Star Trek Discovery, but despite the urgency of the situation, there’s always time to stand face to face and explore feelings.”]
I remember when Star Trek was about a five-year mission to “explore strange new worlds/To seek out new life/And new civilizations/To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Not so with Discovery.
They have no time to explore the universe, they are too busy standing about with watery eyes and quivering lips, yapping about their feelings. Even Spock. Barf. With this show, any new life and new civilization we encounter is just a catalyst for a long self-indulgent simpering, and exposition.
When they aren’t standing face-to-face talking about their feelings, they are standing face-to-face explaining things.
“We can’t do this and this because of that and that, so we have no alternative but to do this and this makes me feel deeply, so deeply that I must unpack my feelings onto you, and the viewing audience, before I do what needs to be done.”
Barf.
But I really like Captain Pike (Anson Mount).
I suppose it’s too much to hope that all the shows current writers and controllers followed Michael Burnham and Discovery into the time-space wormhole leaving Captain Pike and the Enterprise to be the subject of a New Star Trek series.
And then we can follow Spock’s advice and “never to speak of Discovery, its Spore Drive, or her crew again, under penalty of treason.”
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