4 new shows in the works

I did. Out of sheer morbid curiosity. I'm sorry I did. You'd be well advised not to.


As for these shows... I wish I could get excited about them. This could be such an great time to be a Trek fan, but instead we're watching a corporation hack the franchise to pieces and erect a mountain of shit in its place. Looking at the last year, I cannot view anything further with "Star Trek" on it as being a good idea. Star Trek died this year. RIP.

(Okay, it turned out I got specific. Sorry about that, but I started to vent and then I got a bit carried away. Spoilers!)


Everything about it looks and feels inappropriate for the time and place it is claimed to be set in. Discovery doesn't look like a ship of that era. It's also a hideously fugly design. The uniforms, weapons, everything about it just looks wrong and bad. As a minor example, they stick the shield logo all over everything. But at this point in history, the shield logo was the logo of the USS Enterprise. By TNG it became the logo for all of Starfleet, but that hadn't happened yet. The people making this show don't know what they're doing. Or, more likely, don't know and don't care.

The special effects look expensive, but are frequently pointless and poorly executed. This is the kind of show that loves to stage battles where you can't tell what's happening, where there's absolutely no sense of threat or danger, no weight to the proceedings. There's a huge battle in the pilot episodes, and it's just so utterly boring. It's the "throw CGI shit on the screen, if it's fast and complicated it must be good!" school of effects. And it's not a one-off - that's how they do most every battle on the show.

Oh, and as a more glaring example, they've decided for no reason whatsoever to change the Klingon design. AGAIN. The last time this was done it took the franchise years and years to sort it out. And having done so, the Discovery people just thought "screw it, let's make them all different again. Why not?"

All this, and they go around bragging about how they are keeping things in line with canon. Which, again, either they don't know what they're talking about or they're just plain lying. Most recently they decided to call it a "visual reboot", which so far as I know isn't even a thing that exists.

Then most of the characters are awful. I despise Michael Burnham, who is a disobedient, disloyal, traitorous imbecile. She's one of those characters where the writers can't be bothered, or don't know how, to make her a good character, so instead they depict her horribly but then have all the characters around her go on about how wonderful she is. So instead of "Kirk is awesome, look how he bluffed the Romulans in that episode!" we get "Burnham is awesome... because even though she's not, people keep saying she is!"

It also royally screws over Sarek and Spock by the utterly unnecessary move of making Burnham Sarek's adopted daughter. And Sarek apparently really likes and supports his daughter, who is in Starfleet. This at a point in time when he was refusing to speak to or have anything to do with his son, Spock... because he joined Starfleet. So Sarek is a raging hypocrite now, and Spock is estranged from a father who nevertheless dotes on his daughter, who did the same thing Spock did. Christ alone knows what the point of that is - the show seems determined to constantly shoehorn random things from TOS into it, always in ridiculous ways, presumably in hopes that people like me would go "Oh, Sarek is in it, he's always great so this must be a good show." When my actual reaction is "Oh look, they're screwing Sarek's character up as well now."

Oh, and because they once mind melded, Burnham can make telepathic telephone calls to Sarek whenever she likes, from thousands of light years away. Which is just yet another pointless and utterly fucking stupid idea.

Then there's how they screwed up Harry Mudd, who was a criminal but generally rather buffoonish and mostly harmless sort of a person, but in Discovery is a traitorous mass murdering psychopath.

I'd complain about how they bollixed up the Mirror Universe, but meh. DS9 bollixed it up worse. Only TOS and Enterprise ever got the Mirror Universe remotely right.

And honestly, that's just a fraction of what's wrong with this show. I haven't even touched on sonar that works in space, on the bulk of the characters being so boring and undeveloped that they don't even have names for most of the season (so we can have more time to have people talk about how fantastic Burnham-the-traitor is), with people in fandom literally having to talk about them as "the girl with the thing on her face" and "the person who might be wearing a helmet or is possibly a robot".

Or the fact that one of the major plot devices of the whole series is a new type of space drive that works via mushrooms. Yes, seriously. Mushrooms. That spread out in a network across the universe. Because, presumably, it was the winner of a writer's "most idiotic thing you can think of" competition.

And I could STILL go on. This is literally one of the worst excuses for a television show I have ever seen.

I recall that Starfleet Academy idea being thrown around once before. It sounds like a terrible idea as does the Wrath of Khan series. I assume it would be their time spent on the planet before being found by the Reliant.

A TNG continuation is a day late and a dollar short. Brent Spiner couldn't be Data again, he's too old. They're all too old. Also, everything that can be done with the TNG universe has been done.

Star Trek needs a series set hundreds of years after TNG. A new Enterprise and new technology. TNG had a good run with two spin off's, but it's time to let it go and move on.

None of those shows seems good at all.

None of those sound very good.