The season started out strong, with Michael Burnham making decisions and doing things, which sounds funny to say, but the season suffered greatly from a whole lot of nothing going on. And by that I mean, entire arcs that were about nothing much at all.
Adira, who is a zero as a character anyway, leaves for a while and it doesn't matter and nobody cares. They showed up again and people were like, "Were you gone?" Stametts actually said, "Oh, you're back."Tilly, someone we loved, suddenly leaves the show, everyone is sad for literally thirty seconds, then nothing.
Dr. Culber gradually realizes he is upset over legitimate things like BEING DEAD and decides to be allowed to be upset. This takes many scenes over many episodes. It reveals nothing. It shows no growth. He was lovely to start with and lovely to end with. Nothing changed in his behavior or choices because of it.
There is no CHARACTER in any of these characters. Imagine trying to explain one of them to someone: Tilly is, uh, she's funny sometimes and talks too much. That is not a character. Stametts is kind of crabby. THAT is not a character. Saru is...I don't know, tall? An alien fish guy? Culber: sweet guy, used to be dead. Detmer: drives the ship. Even Michael Burnham. Try to explain her character. You can't. She doesn't have one. She's good at getting what she wants? She has a hot boyfriend? People like her? THAT'S NOT A CHARACTER. None of them are actual characters with depth and breadth and issues and enthusiasms and whole entire lives. None of them get beyond a stick figure, in terms of character.
Book had more character than anyone and he was a late addition, and even then it was almost all in terms of trauma: lost his family, lost his planet. Before that he was interesting because he risked a lot to save endangered species. Hey! A personality trait! That's what I like to see. How come Stamets, Detmer, Saru, Culber, Tilly, and Burnham don't have any of those???
There were vast endless flashbacks to fill in backstory over the guy with the U on his forehead, an absolutely uninteresting character who was not even part of the regular cast. I cannot express how little anyone cares WHY this boring person did what they did. We sure didn't need to spend literally half of an episode on their reasons for doing the things they do. It DOESN'T MATTER. We had this villain for many episodes before that and accepted them just fine without this backstory. Who cares? It adds nothing to anything.
Nobody should need this explained to them, but: trauma is not a personality trait. It's terrible and you have to deal with it, but at most HOW YOU DEAL WITH IT could be a personality trait. Those are things you do. Trauma is just what happens to you, which is never interesting. "I won the lottery," whoop de do. "I had my inheritance stolen by my aunts so I made a million dollars by cheating at cards at their casino." That's interesting. Add "And their syndicate is after me because of it, so I'm becoming a nun in this remote location in Uruguay." Now you have a character and a story. Take that person and put them on your spaceship and things are going to happen, because we know what that person is like, we know what they do when they're in trouble, and we know there is something coming to catch up with them.
I kind of liked the season a little, not that you can tell from all that, because it was better than the absolute catastrophe at the end of the previous one, but it was so full of endlessly annoying and pointless BAD DRAMA that a lot of it was something to endure rather than enjoy. Like having a friend you love who tells long boring stories. Sometimes you just have to put up with that.
But it's a tv show, so it really should understand drama better than this.
Stakes! There should be stakes. EVER. Yes, the giant space bubble had stakes because it might destroy more planets. But it's a giant space bubble that moves around erratically, so how are we supposed to get a handle on it? One thing it utterly lacks is personality, but another thing it lacks is any kind of story direction.
Say for example the giant space bubble is plowing a path directly toward Earth from the beginning and we keep trying to stop it or redirect it or whatever but nothing works. Stakes, am I right?
Say Dr. Culber is becoming unable to do his job because of his post-death PTSD. Stakes!
Say Adina is the only one who can manage XYZ whatever so when they go off to settle the literally impossible fake robot with the literally impossible Trill personality, everything falls apart. Stakes!
And Michael Burnham repeatedly--I lost count because it happened so often--does that thing, which I think was supposed to be Kirk-like, maybe, where instead of following all of the advice of everyone with a working brain, she goes off and does this wildly improbable and incredibly dangerous thing while the clock is ticking. And it ALWAYS WORKS OUT. Hi, you just killed all of your stakes, because even I, the queen of suspension of disbelief, get bored with it now. Even I say, "It's going to be fine. It's always fine." NO STAKES.
I can get stressed out reading books I've read many times before, so this is who you've lost. That takes some doing.
Let's not even get started on throwing away actual astronomical reality with this incredibly stupid "galactic barrier" thing. It doesn't exist. It can't exist. But they had some kind of stupid bubbles and had to ride them through the blah blah blah. Trying to manufacture stakes doesn't work when the thing you made up is so completely not part of reality. Do you think we're all incredibly stupid and uneducated? That's what it feels like.
It's like you just said there's a wall of energy at the edge of the ocean that keeps us from walking into it. It's not there. We all know it's not there. Hi, at the edge of the galaxy, there are fewer stars, and then there are no stars, and that's the end of the galaxy.
I don't know how people sleep at night who can throw away not only all of the established rules of this fictional universe (I will never get over stupid Gray, who wasn't even a STORY and was so completely impossible every kind of way) but all of the actual huge obvious realities of the real universe. Like, making up technological things is fine, do whatever, it's the future, but the galactic barrier thing really was profoundly insulting to anyone with even the slightest working knowledge of the ACTUAL GALAXY, a thing which you can see from MY DRIVEWAY.
There's also a major pacing problem. You can't start an episode with these OMG ticking clock emergency oh no things and then pause and spend ten literal human minutes on a slow emotion-based scene which again has no stakes at all. This show does that CONSTANTLY. Who cares if Saru and Vulcan Lady are sharing long looks when Earth is about to explode? It's so tone-deaf, I don't know what to say about it. They simply don't understand pacing in a way I've never seen in a tv show before. You can't drop the energy down to nothing and expect us still to be wired up for the end of the world.
It happens all the time that Michael will be en route to some enormous crisis and stop for a quiet emotional conversation with someone that goes on and on and on. That kills all the energy. Yes, it's a lovely scene, and emotional beats matter, but it's the way they're layered in together that makes for a bewildering and nonsensical sequence of events.
It's like your meal is a bite of delicious hot lasagna, ten after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, another bite of now warm lasagna, a huge cupcake, two bites of cool lasagna and also a gun is held to your grandmother's head, ten more after dinner mints spaced out one per minute, more stone cold lasagna, some salad, a weird concoction of hot peppers and jello, more cold lasagna, and oh no there's still a gun to your grandmother's head, what will happen??? It's exactly that confusing and chaotic in terms of energy level and stakes and plotting and mixing of things that should not be mixed that way.
So anyway. I was relieved when I finished the season. And I was so excited to see that Stacey Abrams was the president of Earth and possibly also Titan, not quite sure. Maybe the short crabby traitor woman is still the leader of Titan? Who committed terrible crimes but somehow it's okay? Also they kept doing this weird thing with her lipstick where sometimes they'd cover the pink part of her lower lip and sometimes they wouldn't. So slapdash, this show.
Ultimately, there were some things I liked, but the characters had no direction or inner conflict and the stories had that fatal lack of stakes problem.
Just think for a moment about Kira Nerys. From the first minute of DS9, she was a former guerrilla working to reclaim a space station from a hateful and atrocity-filled occupation that was just ousted. That is SO MUCH BACKSTORY. She has a direction and an attitude and love and anger and so much going on.
There is not one single character on Discovery that has a hundredth of that energy. Nobody has a direction. Nobody even has a backstory, except formerly dead Dr. Culber, and even that is minimized--people literally tell him he's fine now, so be fine.
The other show that built great backstory into people was Battlestar Galactica. On top of a massive plot conflict between human and Cylon that drove the entire series, it came preloaded with powerful direction and energy for people. That meant that character drove the stories.
Without character energy like that, you have nothing. Character has to drive story or you have cardboard cutouts. And when you can't even set up reasonable stakes each episode, you have this.
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