Star Trek: Discovery, Seasons Two and Three

Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent.

The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three. 

Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I don't know why everyone immediately forgets how to write drama when Klingons are part of a story. The Klingon scenes are unbearably boring and stupid, just people standing around grunting and yelling and giving speeches and occasionally breaking into another dumb physical fight. Story goes there to die.

The best thing about Season Two was Spock, because of the actor, who has an incredible voice and presence. He's also good at being Spock, that combination of withdrawn and sarcastic, above it all but judgmental. His relationship with Michael was excellent, especially when he called her out on being exactly who she is, with her self-important messianic complex. Of course, it did turn out that she really was the red angel, so she was right. And she is the main character of the show, the POV character.

Except then she isn't anymore? In Season Three, truly everything fell apart. 

The show switched to being an ensemble show, which would be fine if any of the bridge crew characters had ANY personality traits or characteristics written in. But they don't. There's an Asian guy, a black guy, a black woman, and a white woman with a facial appliance. I think her name is Detmer? She gets to have some story and personality. The rest don't. I don't even know their names. They are not characters. The black woman suddenly said she was raised in a Luddite community one episode. Interesting. Later she said she was from a family of pearl divers, too. 

These things are just thrown in there. Nobody is developed. Nothing is built up.

Compare that with even just the pilot episode of DS9, where all of the main characters are introduced and we know their traits and backgrounds immediately. Sisko, Kira, Dax, Bashir, Odo, Quark, O'Brien. You CAN do this. You can introduce characters well and quickly and give them depth and conflict and whole lives and issues and directions. 

Discovery is incomparably bad at this. It gets worse and worse when I'm at the end of Season Three and don't know which one is Rhys and which is Bryce, if those are even their names. I don't know and I don't care, because they're not written as PEOPLE. 

I'm angry at this show. 

Season Three seemed to be setting up a cool thing with the sphere data becoming a sentient being, who I thought was Adira, given that she appeared out of nowhere, nobody saw her come in, and she had ridiculously overblown skills and abilities and knowledge for someone of her age. Impossible. 

But no, they put the sphere data into these dumb little robots we've never seen before. And it decided everyone should watch Buster Keaton and laugh their heads off. You guys, nothing against Buster Keaton, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you laugh until you fall over. 

Instead, Adira is nothing. The character gives a speech about being non-binary, so I should say they. But the speech and that fact have NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. It's not part of the story in any way. Not even part of that episode, or that scene. It's a terrible way to write anything. You don't just shove things in there undigested.

How you would do that well: have it be part of a story, any story. Do I even have to say more? No. It's the clunkiest kind of writing. I'm all for representation--that's not the problem. The problem is it's just dropped in there and doesn't mean anything in the story.

Adira also has an imaginary ghost boyfriend who appears then disappears then reappears. That also has nothing to do with any storyline. I can't even express how offended I am by this kind of writing. Because as viewers, as any reader would, we expect things in the story to MEAN SOMETHING. So I'm building theories about what this means, right? There's no earthly sense in putting things into stories that don't mean anything. It's self-indulgent first draft beginning writer nonsense and has no place in a show like this. It's not even a mislead! It's nothing!

If you want it in there, which is fine, make it MEAN something. Make it part of the story. 

Part of the problem here is the promise and the premise. You made a promise that the pieces would add up, but they don't. The premise of sci-fi and every Star Trek show requires that we do the math with the pieces we're given and figure out what they add up to. 

We can't do that if the pieces are meaningless. 

It's beyond infuriating. It feels like we're being tricked. And that feels like everything I hated about Voyager and Enterprise, where you could see the machinery, like someone wanted this element added so suddenly we have this thing, even though it doesn't make sense in any story. I hate that. 

Tell a good story. Good grief. It's literally your only job.

So Adira is nothing and her boyfriend is nothing and the show would be exactly the same without them. Fantastic. We already had Tig Notaro to do everything Adira was doing. Adira kind of replaced her. Terrible.

The shift to ensemble focus meant we lost the drive that was Michael Burnham's story and her need to solve problems. They gave her another beautiful boyfriend, yay, and I love Book like I loved Ash before he developed that speech problem and story problem, but Book again has NO PURPOSE in the storytelling. He has a cool ship and some local connections, fine, but Michael could have developed those in the year she was there alone. That would have been BETTER. Yes, I want her to be happy and have a beautiful boyfriend, but he could have been, oh, I don't know, one of those stupid bridge crew with no personality. 

They don't know how to make anything mean anything.

Imagine if Michael had been trying to be all Starfleet by herself and save everyone and that's what brought the Orions down on her and caused everything else down the line. That is good storytelling. That's what they did in the first season and to a lesser extent in the second season. A character does a thing out of inner need/conflict and that brings about effects that they then have to cope with. Character, choice, consequences. THAT IS STORYTELLING.

Instead we have this atrocious mishmash of random elements. I hate it.

By halfway through the third season, it was clear something was terrible wrong at the helm. We had three or four episodes that included very long extended sequences of alternate reality or dream world situations, which classically stop the action in its tracks because it could be anything and doesn't mean anything. What happens in a dream never matters. There are no stakes and no consequences. The final few episodes also focused on this kid who grew up alone in a holosuite kind of environment.

It almost makes me sick even to say it, but the plot revolved around getting him to face his biggest fear. This is a character who's not even on the main cast! And they made him talk like a damaged child, as though he grew up alone, when he grew up with a full set of advisors and teachers and a holo-grandfather. He would have spoken like them! The fate of the whole galaxy rests on this adult child opening a door. We don't know him or care about him and he's deeply unappealing so we never start.

Nothing is ever thought through by the last five or so episodes. 

The utterly boring and pointless mirror universe/dream/holosuite portions aside, with the leader of the Orions we also had ANOTHER atrocious case of a British actress who could not keep her American accent on, who even slipped between them seven times in one sentence. How is this happening in a tv show? How did they not make her dub her dialogue? Was nobody listening? People dub dialogue all the time. It was so bad.

She was also a boring cruel tyrant who saved one guy in a wheelchair, so we were supposed to be conflicted about her, but that doesn't work. She was obviously a cartoon villain. Ugh. She had no motivation and no reason to be doing what she was doing. And the shenanigans they used to get her into the heart of Starfleet headquarters were just ridiculous. Every single thing about her stretched suspension of disbelief far beyond the breaking point. Her PANTS didn't even fit. Nobody was driving the ship at this point.

The last episode was so far beyond any sense that I can hardly wrap my head around it. It was all after the fact logic. Like: we want Michael to save the day, so back up and make this happen. 

As an example, they had the villain open the vents so Discovery's air was getting sucked out...but slowly. WHY? Because they wanted the bridge crew to have to struggle to accomplish [whatever it was] by making their way to the nacelles through an empty ship. It was transparently a convenient obstacle placed there to give them something to do. And they did it, boy howdy, lots of acting class falling and gasping for air and the heroic pearl diver making her way there, only to fail at the last second. Oh she also shouted "I LOVE YOU ALL" to everyone, like Michael usually does, only it was so awkward and not set up in any way and so cringeworthy I may have had an out of body experience. Then she got rescued by the idiotic robot who saved the day. It sacrificed itself! But they fixed it so it was fine! NOTHING MATTERS.

It all feels so slapped together and profoundly tone deaf and stupid and it's just such fundamentally poor storytelling on every level. It's hard to believe it's the same show. But I suppose it isn't. Apparently they had a major meltdown at the highest levels and lost Bryan Fuller, who must have been bringing an awful lot to the table, because this was abysmal dreck.

Look, at the end they theorize that Book can use his magical empathy powers to communicate with the spore drive, because Stametts is where again? I DON'T KNOW. Because nothing made sense. It was like an improvised skit at this point. And so Michael sends him down there and ejects the warp core FOR NO REASON before they even know if Book can do this thing nobody in the universe but Stametts can do. And then it explodes, which the warp core doesn't do just on its own. Who cares about following the rules of an established universe, though, am I right? Why shouldn't a human get a Trill host, when that's completely impossible? Why not let magic empathy man control the spore drive?

Oh, and the one character who was sort of developed, Tilly, who is an engineering ENSIGN, gets made acting captain. There is no way this makes any sense at all. She's not qualified or capable. And of course she's a disaster at it and everything goes to hell. Why do something so terrible to this character who didn't deserve it? Make fun of the fat lady is what I see. They treat her like a joke. Someone can be funny without being a joke and that's how it should be, not this cruelty and mockery. The point of this is to try her out, make her fail, and make everyone glad when Michael is made captain. UGH.

There's another whole stupid thing about how the holosuite changed everyone's species randomly, which was transparently so we could get the luminous Doug Jones out of his horrible prosthetic makeup for once and see how lovely and wonderful he is, which I am all for, but again this is a ridiculous thing to do and it makes no story sense and kicks us out of the episode entirely. 

I was awake half the night, I was so angry about what this show devolved into by the end of season three.

Will I watch Season Four? I don't know if there's any coming back from this. Maybe it was a terrible period of transition and everyone dropped the ball and production had to march on with whatever they had. I imagine the people making the show were given impossible jobs to do, when there's no continuity or natural story drive. I did complain about this even with Season One. When someone wants something, or people have a goal, that should drive things, not this backwards reverse engineering of a story and shoehorning characters and scenes in to achieve some non-story goal. Nothing feels organic or sensible when you do that. 

Of course you CAN start with those elements that you want to have in there, but you have to build them in sensibly, not just slap them on afterward.

My goal here is always to learn more about how to (and how not to) tell a story, so in that sense, good job, Discovery! I really am here to learn. And lower my blood pressure and get more sleep by getting all this off my chest, because wow, it sure kept me agitated and awake last night. 

At this point, I am really not enjoying the show at all, though, so we'll see whether my compulsion to finish things overcomes my aversion to terrible slapdash storytelling. 

What a disservice to a show that had so much promise and actors that can and do give us so much more.