The Discovery Discussion Thread.

The youtube channel Midnight's Edge has put a lot of stuff out about Discovery. Much is rumour... but I've found their reporting to be very accurate in the past (they predicted the issues with the Ghostbusters remake and Fantastic Four reboot well in advance, for instance).

According to them Discovery was greenlit in response to an internal report suggesting there was sufficient market to make a high budget show profitable on CBS All Access. The trouble is, the report was five years old - meaning it predated much of the recent Netflix rise to prominence. Then, of course, the show's development turned out to be a string of disasters.

So instead of having a highly anticipated show in a largely empty marketplace, they wound up with a show fans are at best hugely split on, in a rather crowded marketplace. And then The Orville came along and offered their alternative up for free...

Opinions vary. Of course, none of the other shows were asking you to pay out subscription fees for poor episodes whilst they took a year or two to get it right.

Another Midnight's Edge suggestion was this - and then take that two parter and show it during the mid season break as a special event prequel showing "what happened to Burnham". They'd probably have had a fair bit of anticipation for that... 

Yeah. Especially as the other characters are actually rather better than Burnham, so far. It's really odd to see likeable, able characters telling us that the incompetent criminal is the best officer they know.

Oddly enough, I agree with you - and that was the final nail in the coffin of this show for me.

It's why it has gone from a show I dislike to a show I truly hate with the burning heat of a million exploding stars.

If there is one aspect of Star Trek that I truly, utterly, totally LOATHE... it is the abomination that is "Section 31".

May the people who conceived this show burn in the deepest pits of hell if this is the case.

Yes. In other words... be a Star Trek show.

External cynicism, sure. Rather less internal cynicism.

It's arguable. I tend to count it as such, but I could be sympathetic to the idea that it wasn't.

That's one interpretation. And sure, DS9 was certainly a darker show. I think it was also rather less dark than you seem to think it was, though. And notably, one of the least popular shows at that.

I see a lot of people saying thing like this, but I never see anybody justifying it. Why did it have to become something else? And why THIS other thing, that sucks a big pile of ass? And why set it in a place in the timeline that locks you into being one fairly specific thing, and then not be that thing? It's senseless.

And even assuming it did have to become something else, why didn't they have the balls to actually make it something else? Why call it "Star Trek" at all?

Seems to me that all you're saying here is that Star Trek isn't a suitable series for the modern world. If so then fair enough. Let it die. Better still, let the fans do what CBS is determined to stop them from doing for reasons that escape me - produce their own material.

What we're getting is like you have a beloved parent and one day he dies and you bury him, then a few days later somebody digs the body up and skins it and puts the skin on with your dad's clothes over it and knocks on your door saying "Hey, I'm your dad now! This is okay, isn't it? Let's go do something fun!"

I'm not sure how they expect to appeal to a wider audience by making a show that's an expensive pile of garbage. But then we live in a world where Transformers movies are a thing, so who knows.

Though if the rumours are true, it is failing to do that rather spectacularly. Which pleases me no end.

But hey, The Orville is excellent. So there's that.

Dear lord, every time I think that I hate the USS Fugly design as much as I am capable of hating anything in this world, they go and find a way to make me hate it even more.

I always suspected that those utterly stupid saucer hull rings rotated. christ on a pogo stick, this show is just plain stupid.

Oh well. Stupid people need sci fi shows to watch too, I guess

Getting rid of bigotry and human's working together is one thing (and entirely present on Discovery) but the condescending bettering ourselves gibberish was indeed entirely TNG. Neither Voyager, DS9 nor Enterprise possessed quite the same level of smugness.

Picard talks about people doing things purely to better themselves on a ship that has waiters, and in an universe where people like Bilby work for the syndicate and where Federation member species like the Trill (such as Ezri's mother) work in mining. TNG blew smoke up its own ass and insinuated a paradise that simply didn't exist.

I very much doubt that that's the truth. In fact I think that a plausible argument could be made that any interstellar society would almost by definition wind up as a moneyless one.

That said, Star Trek really doesn't do a very plausible job of depicting a moneyless society. Largely because they keep showing people doing the kinds of things that make a lot more sense in a society with profit motives built in.

If you want a far better view of what a moneyless society could look like, go read the Iain M. Banks Culture novels. The Culture is a society that has no money and it's depicted far more plausibly than Trek ever did it.