Tag Archives: The Burn

Mar 5 2023

Star Trek: Discovery Concludes With Its Fifth Season

Star Trek fans have either been mourning or celebrating the recent announcement that the Paramount + streaming series, Star Trek: Discovery, will end when its upcoming fifth season concludes.

Ever since Star Trek: Discovery was first announced back in 2016 and debuted on CBS All Access the series was mired in controversey and alienated many fans. Instead of there being a mutual celebration that Star Trek finally returned to TV, fandom was bitterly divided over the TV show.

Even though Star Trek has always been forward thinking, progressive and pushed social envelopes, Star Trek: Discovery is overtly and even aggressive with its progressiveness. It has a Black woman as the main character, it features a homosexual couple and even a non-binary character. This made many fans uncomfortable, especially those who are more socially conservative, and they were quick to deride the show.

However, while it may be easy for these fans to dismiss Star Trek: Discovery for its so-called “wokeness”, the show had many problems that did not have to do with the racial or sexual nature of its characters.

Basically, Star Trek: Discovery departed too far from what worked with Star Trek, which was presenting engaging characters, well-written and provocative storylines, and an interesting premise. It did have its moments, especially in its second season, and it ushered in a new era for Star Trek, but from its pilot episode “The Vulcan Hello” it was apparent it had its faults.

To start, by setting the show just a few short years before the original Star Trek it wrecked the complex Trek continuity that is cherished by fans. Being that it was a modern show with access to the best special effects technology available, the look of the show was vastly different from the primitive production design of the original Star Trek. Of course, we viewers were supposed to ignore that but it was a nagging stickler for continuity’s sake.

There was little attempt to at least try to copy the look of the orginal Star Trek, as with the distinctive gold, blue and red uniforms, the Klingons received an ugly redesign that no one asked for, and the starship Discovery had technology that was so advanced compared to what we saw in other Star Trek shows and films. For example, why didn’t the ships in the other Star Trek shows have this revolutionary spore drive that allowed the Discovery to travel anywhere in the galaxy? It seemed as if the showrunners had little regard for what worked before and for what fans wanted. A full-scale war with Klingons that no one talked about in the other shows? Klingons that eat humans? The showrunners even botched the Mirror Universe and let their actors chew the scenes to the point that it was comical but not in a good way. The show departed from previous Treks in that it was no longer episodic and followed a season-long arc (the Klingon War with a visit to the Mirror Universe). While this echoed what modern TV shows do, when Star Trek: Discovery tried it the execution was poor. Becoming an arc-oriented TV show somehow robbed it of a key premise of Star Trek, which was exploring new worlds and civilizations.

Seeing the negative reactions to Star Trek: Discovery, the showrunners hastily tried to course correct for the remainder of the show’s run with mixed results. In the second season, Captain Christopher Pike and Spock were added to the cast and they were the best things on the show thanks to the acting chops of Anson Mount and Ethan Peck. The stories revolving around them captivated viewers and were the highlights of the second season, but frankly this took time away from the regular characters. This was another issue with the show in that the recurring and guest characters were more interesting or had more screen time than the regular cast. Aside from Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), Saru (Doug Jones), Paul Stemets (Anthony Rapp), and Sylivia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), we barely knew anything about the bridge crew. We see them all the time saying “Aye sir” and spouting technobabble, but most viewers would be hard-pressed to even know their names. Instead, lots of bandwidth was spent on Pike, Spock, Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) and most recently with the intergalactic courier Cleveland Booker (David Ajala). The show is supposed to be about the starship Discovery and its crew.

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Jan 22 2021

A Review Of Star Trek: Discovery Season 3

The third season of Star Trek: Discovery concluded the other week with the finale “The Hope That Is You, Part II”, which was a peculiar title since the premiere episode was part I. This helps illustrate the off-kilter nature of Star Trek: Discovery’s third season. It had a great premise which functioned as a soft reboot for the show, but the execution was lacking at times and has turned off fans.

In the final second season episode of the show, the U.S.S. Discovery was hurled over 900 years into the distant future and the latest season chronicles the crew of the Federation starship after they arrive in the year 3188. Or rather the series lead Commander Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) arrives in that year ahead of her starship. After Burnham and her crewmates are reunited they set out to find out what happened to the United Federation of Planets. At this time in history, the Federation is a shadow of its former glorious self. Roughly a hundred years prior, the galaxy suffered an event called The Burn that destroyed most of the Federation’s Starfleet and Star Trek’s crystalline power source, dilithium crystals became a rare commodity. Meanwhile, the Federation was forced to contract its vast borders as core member worlds like Earth and Vulcan (now called Ni’Var) left it to become independent states.

Before long, the Discovery and its crew encounter the remnants of the Federation and soon offer their services to help rebuild the Federation with the aid of their ship’s unique spore drive that can travel instantly throughout the galaxy. By the way, the ship received a nifty upgrade.

To repeat, this is a terrific premise but the execution was woefully uneven and frustrating at times. 

First the good: The production was exceptional with film-quality special effects and production design that rivals the J.J. Abrams films (fans of those films will be pleased to know that that alternate universe was mentioned in one episode).

Many of the new characters were instantly engaging and memorable such as Cleveland “Book” Booker (David Ajala), your typical space rogue with a heart of gold and Burnham’s love interest. Book was a fascinating rogue who had selfish motives in the beginning but quickly allowed his inner goodness come to light and he strove to become part of Starfleet. Speaking of Starfleet, the show introduced one of Star Trek’s best admirals with Admiral Charles Vance (Oded Fehr) who projected the gravitas of a seasoned and reasonable leader. He also helped make up for the loss of Captain Pike, one of the best highlights of the second season. The Discovery also recruited a young human Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio), who is co-joined with a Trill symbiont and possesses a keen scientific mind. Occassionally, they (as Adira asked to be referred to) interacts with their deceased lover and previous Trill host Grey Tal (Ian Alexander). It turned out that Grey was not a hallucination and in a later episode when other Discovery crew members were able to see and interact with Grey, these encounters were one of the best emotional highlights of the season. 

The new baddies in the Star Trek universe are the Emerald Chain, a criminal organization led by Orions and Andorians who now occupy significant portions of former Federation space. Their leader is Osyrra (Janet Kidder), a vicious and manipulative thug who will stop at nothing to capture the Discovery and steal its technology. Basically the Emerald Chain are the Ferengi on super steroids and gave us a hint of how the Ferengi were supposed to be portrayed in early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Some episodes were quite good like the premier episode and season finale; “There is a Tide…”, which basically was Die Hard on the Discovery with Michael Burnham doing a bang up job as as 32nd century John McClane; “Far From Home” reunited Burnham with the Discovery; and “Unification III” had the Disocvery travleing to the former Vulcan. This episode functioned as a distant sequel to the TNG episodes “Unification I and II” and gave us a brief cameo of Leonard Nimoy as Spock. 

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