Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Star Trek: Discovery
By 2018, when Chris Chibnall commenced the third primary creative era of the modern Doctor Who, media franchises were not so much increasingly the norm as wholly established as the norm. These were the days when high profile returns of long dormant franchises were the norm, whether in the form of outright revivals as things like Murphy Brown and Roseanne staggered from their graves for a new season, or in the ever popular form of reboots, with Lost in Space, Magnum, P.I., DuckTales, Charmed, and She-Ra all making returns. Film was much the same—nine of the top ten films in 2018 were installments of pre-existing franchises, four of them based on Marvel Comics properties. (This was in fact low—2017 and 2019 were each ten for ten, where 2018 had the differently nostalgic Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody to break things up.) These are the sorts of facts that make you start to sympathize deeply with Alan Moore at his crankiest.
Curiously absent from this tendency thus far was Star Trek. Sure there’d been the three Chris Pine movies set in what is apparently widely referred to within fandom as the Kelvin Timeline, but this was a shocking meager return—three films from 2006-2016—for one of the two most iconic American sci-fi franchises, especially in an era when fandoms and franchises were so very much the norm. And so it was much overdue in late 2017 when CBS launched their streaming exclusive Star Trek: Discovery, the first attempt at a Star Trek TV show in over a decade. Unfortunately, the result had much to say bout the painfully cynical nature of franchise media in the late 2010s.
To start, the show had what can only be called a troubled development. It was originally the product of Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller, who pitched an anthology series that would move to a new ship and era of Star Trek history with each season, starting just before the original 1960s series. Fuller worked on the show for the better part of a year before being sacked for failing to adhere to CBS’s over-ambitious production timeline for the show, and was replaced by Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harbets, who would eventually find themselves sacked for going over budget and for stories of abusive behavior during production. A microcosm of the tensions in play here comes with the discussion over uniforms, with Fuller originally wanting something that was based on the brightly colored 1960s uniforms, while CBS insisted on a more austere and military-style uniform, continuity (and for that matter nostalgia aesthetics) be damned. It’s a small thing, but indicative—the sort of thing that quietly speaks volumes about just how cynical an effort this actually was.
So it’s not a surprise that the resultant show was not good. If anything it’s a mild surprise that it was not bad either. Instead it hovers along at a vague watchability—a level that’s clearly tremendously disappointing from any perspective that holds a lot of hope about what Star Trek could be in 2017. This is not a show with ambitions beyond “being a Star Trek show that can help drive subscriptions to CBS All Access.” Its commercial purpose is its artistic purpose. We’ve seen this before—a similar accusation can be leveled against Class and efforts to launch the online-exclusive BBC Three as a serious concern. Obviously, this cannot be done successfully with a bad show. But it does not strictly speaking require a good show either, and Star Trek: Discovery threaded that needle with an almost grotesque degree of precision.
The result is a sort of strange, uncanny valley version of contemporary understandings of good television. The basic markers of what “good television” looks like in 2017-18 are all there, and executed with confidence, but there’s nothing else there. The show is just a series of formulaic “good television” plot beats with the iconography of Star Trek serving in place of actual content or ideas. Where Mr. Robot was “good television” about capitalism, identity, and the digital world or Succession was “good television” about the petty sociopathy of wealth or Killing Eve was “good television” about sapphic obsession and self-destructiveness, Star Trek: Discovery was “good television” about being Star Trek.
What this meant in practice was a sort of high octane flood of major revelations and plot twists that piled one on top of another without exploring them. The show began, in a trio of episodes Fuller got some writing credit on, with a high paced premise: Michael Burnham, the second in command on a Federation ship, becomes the first Federation officer to be jailed for mutiny after she incapacitates her captain to open fire on some Klingons. She’s eventually rescued out of a prison ship by the mysterious Captain Gabriel Lorca, who runs a ship with (and here’s the show’s most delightfully barmy idea) a mushroom-based drive that can effectively teleport.
All of this happens at high speed, but fine, that’s what setting up your premise is like. In the normal order of things you then slow down and, you know, tell some stories with that premise. But no. Instead we get a bewildering series of escalations. Klingon conspiracies! Lorca is actually from the Mirror Universe! Michael’s boyfriend is actually a mindwiped and genetically altered Klingon warrior being used as a spy! It’s a lot, to say the least, and leaves one wishing you could just have a nice quiet episode where people turn into horny salamanders again. You know, like the good old days.
But no, those days of “planet of the week” Star Trek where the show was just allowed to be a vehicle for trying to tell science fiction stories of wildly varying quality are long gone here. Sure, occasionally we do actually get a self-contained episode with a weird time loop or an alien planet, but for the most part this is Star Trek as continual event—everything designed to be shouted in capital letters, but no actual content to the message.
Is this worth being upset about? At some point—and book twelve of this series is as good a time as any—we should maybe just admit that reviving a fifty year old franchise might not be the best thing to do in the twenty-first century. Alan Moore usually has a point, y’know? It’s notable that my examples of good serious TV were all original properties. Likewise, the show that had the same iron grip on the Hugo Awards as Doctor Who in 2006-12 during the years since Discovery premiered was The Good Place. For all the emphatic popularity of mega-franchises, they’re largely not where the quality is. Maybe you just shouldn’t have Star Trek come back.
The thing is, though, that Star Trek doesn’t really feel played out. Utopian space opera spent enough time out of fashion that it’s probably ready for a strong revisitation, in which case there’s going to be something to do with Star Trek, given how many of the standard genre tropes it established. Is that necessarily a better idea than just doing some new science fiction ideas? No, absolutely not. If you gave me the choice between getting to do a Star Trek reboot or getting to do the comic about a generation starship Penn and I want to do (to be called The Ark of Infinity, because I am incorrigible) I’d 100% decide to do the latter. But in the larger context of art getting made there’s absolutely room for both, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a pretty solid idea for what I’d do with Star Trek given the chance. (Bounce it forward to the 25th century and acknowledge the way in which the space future was rendered obsolete by the digital one we actually got by finally advancing artificial intelligences into being a major part of the Federation, probably by having the ships be sentient. Yes, this pitch is just “what if we made Star Trek into the Culture.”)
And yet there’s still a specter of ugliness hanging over this entire idea, and Star Trek: Discovery is a perfectly good metonym for it. Yes, it’s still perfectly easy to come up with good ideas for what to do with a beloved old franchise. And yet at around the quarter point of the 21st century it’s hard to look at longrunning franchises—whether in general or in most specific cases—and think “yes, this is good.” The streaming model, peak television, and the reduction of television to “content” have done very, very bad things to the industry, at least when it comes to the use of franchises as tentpoles. Discovery is very much the norm—what you can expect franchise media to be. It’s all cinematic universes and “properties” now. You can’t turn Star Trek into the Culture because what people want is for you to turn Star Trek into fucking Marvel. Indeed, what people want is for the entirety of fucking culture into Marvel.
I opened the Capaldi era with a discussion of the creative challenges facing Moffat. Here we have a different set of challenges—an existential question about what a fifty-five year old franchise can be. And the Marvel option is really, really popular. I remember a thing that went around social media a while ago—an excited “what if the BBC did a ton of spinoffs” thing that was edited to look just like Disney’s timelines for Marvel and Star Wars. And I get it. I get the enthusiasm and the earnestness, and I really want to stress that I’m not mocking it here, but…
Look, frankly, it makes me want to vomit. Doctor Who was born of the specific and idiosyncratic concerns of BBC television. It’s a product of those things—an amazingly, astoundingly flexible product of them, but still fundamentally its own thing. The last thing I want in life is for Doctor Who to just become the BBC’s Marvel. If that was what I wanted I’d just cover Big Finish. Where, of course, we got similar flowchart-based storytelling for the absurd Time Lord Victorious crossover, which, impressively, nobody could actually explain to me what the fuck was about even when it was about 2/3 over. (The Dark Times and abolishing death, apparently.)
And yes, spinoffs have existed, but first of all, let’s be honest, neither Torchwood nor The Sarah Jane Adventures aged especially well, certainly compared to Doctor Who during the same era. Second of all, those shows filled specific briefs in terms of what the BBC was during an expansionist period. By 2018 the BBC was more or less at “maybe if we’re transphobic enough the Tories will let us live,” which didn’t really generate any urgent need for Doctor Who spinoffs save, perhaps, one with a male lead to appease the TERF/#NotMyDoctor crowd.
But this was the gravitational pull on Doctor Who in 2018. This was what the world expects a science fiction franchise to be. And that in turn sets the expectations that Doctor Who needs to fight against in this era. What is necessary is simply to have an identity—to be a show with things to say about the world and a mode of existence that is something other than the BBC’s version of a giant franchise. More than absolutely anything, Doctor Who in 2018 needed to be itself, whatever that might mean. This was a time to pull away from gigantic considerations of lore, away from the mythos, and simply to tell stories with ideas in them—ones with a point of view and something to say. It was, in short, a time when the single most important thing Doctor Who could possibly be is “nothing like Star Trek: Discovery.”
These were dangerous and challenging times. I mean, that goes well beyond Doctor Who. This was America in the midst of a fascist takeover, with Britain in the midst of trying desperately and futilely to get the result of the Brexit vote to be anything other than an absolute calamity. 2018 was not a good year—a statement that seems faintly remarkable in the context of the couple of years that followed it, but was nevertheless the case. And in the face of that was one of the largest tides of genericization that popular culture had, frankly, ever seen. Making Doctor Who that rose to the challenges of the time was no small challenge.
Enter Chris Chibnall, then.
January 1, 2024 @ 1:24 pm
Can I ask, out of curiosity, if you think Discovery got better or worse as it changed creative hands and premises another couple times in the next three seasons? Because, given what you’ve said above, I very much see you going either way.
January 1, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
Yeah, I’m now cautiously interested in finding that out as well.
Not to mention whether or not the clear fact that Discovery also enabled them to try such a successfully broad range of other spin-offs helps to justify it at all. But that’s possibly for later?
January 1, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
I didn’t watch subsequent seasons.
January 1, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
Decent cast, lots of interesting ideas, really, really confused direction with muddled themes. I didn’t regret watching Discovery and it got better (didn’t watch season 4 after it went to Paramount+ rather than Netflix internationally) but it was a show that didn’t know what it wanted to be. There was scope for a really interesting series led by Jason Isaacs about a Federation ship with a genuinely evil captain who can get away with it because the Federation is at war. There was scope for a more 1940’s camp evil space empire show with Michelle Yeoh running an evil space empire. That Discovery eventually spun off the most dull idea the show had (just update the original Star Trek and follow the Enterprise under Captain Pike) but that dull idea (Strange New Worlds) works much better is a good advert for the quality of the execution being more important than premise.
January 1, 2024 @ 7:28 pm
But surely at least part of that is due to the modern streaming world in which you get 10 episodes to do three seasons worth of stories just in case you don’t get a second season. Once it became clear that Discovery wasn’t going to be a fail, they could do single stories over six or ten episodes instead of trying to squash it all into their one shot at glory. I mean, yes, I too would loved to have seen both of those stories (Lorca and Georgiou) run full seasons or more, but I can also understand the dilemma they had. Consider, for comparison, the pretty much perfect construction of the Eccleston season of Doctor Who – it might well have been the only one, so RTD had to make it work as a single unit whilst also including everything and the kitchen sink. Whereas S1 of Strange New Worlds feels a lot more relaxed by comparison.
January 2, 2024 @ 1:13 pm
Yes, absolutely. Part of the messiness of S1 Discovery is them working out how to do Star Trek in the streaming era. I think Fuller’s plan before being dropped was for a shorter season 1 with a stronger overall story arc, which would make more sense for a binge-able streaming show.
January 1, 2024 @ 4:47 pm
Michael Burnham’s character arc is the most unpredictable, chaotic and rewarding of all the Starfleet captains – journeys that alternate dimensions and timelines, demigod hood, assimilation into cybernetic hive minds and alien species, galactic wars, and being stranded across time, space, and reality.
What the gatekeepers overlook is Discovery’s greatest strength – evolutionary change of not just the main characters, random societies and empires, as well the entire Federation itself. By the end of season four Discovery looks at its universe through eyes that have been through upheaval, betrayal and renewal. Discovery is the Roddenberry ideal: humanity discovering the best version of itself through imagination and hope.
January 1, 2024 @ 7:30 pm
Yeah, it was great seeing Discovery getting to do Andromeda, but properly.
January 1, 2024 @ 6:37 pm
You can’t turn Star Trek into the Culture because what people want is for you to turn Star Trek into fucking Marvel.
If, by “people”, you mean
(a) the specific subset of “people” whom Terry Pratchett coined “the other lifeforms” (the sort of bipeds who told him “This Mort looks good, but lose the whole Death angle”);
(b) the other specific subset for which Harlan Ellison (may his memory be annoying) either coined or popularized the term of art “the Great Wad” (whose tastes the Other Lifeforms have so starved that they are now “capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise”);
(c) the deeply unholy combination of the two;
then yeah, I’d say that’s which “people” want that.
January 1, 2024 @ 8:23 pm
Sometimes I think a series lives too long.
January 2, 2024 @ 11:40 am
It’s slightly jarring when you not only refuse to engage with the work in detail, but miss parts of the cultural context it was released in that you do engage with. It absolutely has a coherent and complete point of view. The context it was released in was a strange intersection where they launched an mcu with a good television show, which are actually two very contradictory briefs. It could only have happened in that couple of years long window. The show is as much about Star Trek as it is about a revisionist take on the worldview of Star Trek. While the themes are expanded to their radical endpoints at the end of season 3 the first season stands on its own as a singular work. In short it is about a deterministic theory of mind seeking best case scenario under extremely coercive circumstances. All good artworks have a deterministic theory of mind aside from Doctor Who.
January 2, 2024 @ 1:30 pm
“ All good artworks have a deterministic theory of mind aside from Doctor Who” is a truly amazing sentence, in that it is both completely incoherent and self-evidently untrue.
January 2, 2024 @ 2:17 pm
I challenge you to a duel on this hill.
January 2, 2024 @ 3:16 pm
I mean you’re in my comments section and have my attention, if you want to take a shot take a shot. Your first was cryptic at best.
January 2, 2024 @ 4:59 pm
I hazily recall reading an essay about West Wing and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Don’t you think the legitimate culture shock of Discovery presenting a world that is catastrophically falling apart because of its institutions, and making depicting this an aesthetic virtue is valuable?
January 4, 2024 @ 2:17 pm
The idea that the whole show might be about para experiences was suggested fairly strongly when Ash Tyler/Voq started acting like a sex offender after being brainwashed by a sex abuser. I picked up that it was probably about abuse around the time the opening credits of the first episode rolled and every image was meant to drive home that it was doing Star Trek as Hannibal. Then they kept driving the point home every time he appeared on screen in the second season. And then “Grey” happened.
January 4, 2024 @ 4:21 pm
In both cases, I point to my complaint about ceaseless incident. Yes, there are themes you could unpack out of these plot details. But that requires slowing down and actually exploring the space around plot events instead of moving on to the next one. If this is supposed to be Star Trek as Hannibal then where are the lengthy scenes of character work in which Lorca and Burnham speak in cryptic philosophical aphorisms while nothing actually happens? If it’s about a world disintegrating because of the failures of its institutions then where are the planet of the week episodes in which we actually see that world and its consequences?
They’re nowhere, because every episode of this show is an Event Episode. And when your show is simply constantly throwing events at the screen in a desperate attempt to get headlines and social media engagement, the irony is that it largely feels like nothing is actually happening.
January 5, 2024 @ 1:05 am
Part of the reason why the pacing might seem off might depend on whether you saw it in one go or an episode a week. I like to think of the first season as a 12 hour movie but I saw it an episode a week which leaves time to reflect on the subtleties. With Flux on the other hand you can’t wait a week between episodes. And I like some pretty good movies. Refn and Trier and things like that.
January 5, 2024 @ 1:08 am
I watched it at an episode a week.
January 3, 2024 @ 6:29 am
I don’t know what a “deterministic theory of mind” is supposed to be, but I can at least observe that “Doctor Who” is not an artwork, it’s more like a gallery in which artworks like “Full Circle” or “Aliens of London” can be found.
January 3, 2024 @ 8:05 pm
If it’s an art gallery, it’s one in which every single painting, no matter the style or period, seems to involve at least one dog playing poker.
January 7, 2024 @ 3:15 pm
The last two sentences fell a bit too much into the register of schizoposting to appropriate a term (I don’t actually have schizophrenia).
January 2, 2024 @ 8:41 pm
“… everything designed to be shouted in capital letters, but no actual content to the message.”
This right here, on a number of levels. It only got worse as the show went character’s, with characters exchanging aphorisms about science and faith and resilience and belonging. They wanted so much for the show to be ABOUT SOMETHING but had no idea how to make it happen through storytelling…it was as if they took a bunch of notes from the tone meeting and transcribed them directly as dialogue.
There are a million other things about this show that drove me nuts like that. In subsequent seasons Burnham goes from being a stoic near-Vulcan to making extravagant emotional displays all the time. Nothing inherently wrong or strange about that – characterisations change on a new show, and in some ways that was a smart choice, as Sonequa Martin-Green is much more of a Shatner than a Nimoy as an actress (not a diss). But the show never does the work to make it land as real character growth. In contrast, Burnham’s penchant for insubordination remains a constant throughout the series, and by the time the show time jumps to the far future she is actively rewarded for disobeying orders with her own command. There was great potential in there to interrogate the militarism of starfleet and experiment with new structures of authority, but nope, it’s just that Burnham is the main character, so she’s in command now. I checked out after season three so maybe it got better, but it was exhausting to try and connect with a show where stuff just…happens.
January 2, 2024 @ 8:43 pm
*got worse as the show went ON, I meant.
January 3, 2024 @ 12:56 pm
I’m now curious as to your overall opinion on the marvel cinematic universe. In the pop between realities on Captain America: The Winter Soldier made you seem neutral to positive on it, but the way you have referred to it in this article makes it seem like you quite intensely dislike it.
January 3, 2024 @ 1:37 pm
I’m a lot more sympathetic to it in 2014 than I am in 2018, and a lot more even still than 2023.
January 3, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
I’m curious what you think makes 2018 mcu worse than 2014 mcu. I personally think the four movie stretch of Guardians Of The Galaxy 2, Spider-man Homecoming, Thor Ragnarok, and Black Panther is probably the best the MCU gets on the whole. Guardians Of The Galaxy 2 hits quite hard emotionally for me, Ragnarok is one of the frustratingly few times they let a director have their own voice rather than keep to their own style, Black Panther gets points for probably being one of the more theme driven marvel movies, and while there’s nothing that particularly stands out about Homecoming, I personally think it’s charming and has quite good characterization.
January 3, 2024 @ 1:57 pm
Edit: When I said keep to their own style, I meant to type “the mcu house style”
January 3, 2024 @ 3:57 pm
Three films a year versus the already “gosh they make a lot of these” two, an increasing degree of house style and sense that these are an assembly line instead of a neat trick of tying a couple bespoke film series into a whole.
I suspect a big problem is that each new sub-series, even if it had its own distinct vibe, still did more to strengthen the sense of homogeneity than it did to break it. Like, sure, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man were all similar, but they felt more different from each other than anything felt different from anything else once you added in Guardians, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Black Panther, and the impending Captain Marvel and once you’d dramatically dialed up the amount of cross-film connections.
By 2018 it was clear to me I was going to stop watching with Endgame. By 2023, I’ve not once regretted that.
January 7, 2024 @ 4:05 am
For me, NuTrek comes close to fulfilling the old Lawrence Miles prophecy about nuWho: that it would come back, get cancelled, then come back successfully as animation.
I don’t think any of the live action series, Picard, Discovery or Strange New Worlds, can hold a candle to Prodigy or Lower Decks, which offer unique takes on the formula not hemmed in by previous characters or continuity.
January 10, 2024 @ 11:13 pm
Time Lord Victorious is the story of the Pearl Harbor of the Time War. The Daleks travel back to Rassilon’s time and attack Gallifrey. The TARDIS manipulates one Doctor (the tenth) and pulls two more (the ninth and the eighth) out of time to defeat the Daleks in the Dark Times and also to teach the eighth Doctor that, at some point, he’s won’t have any choice, he’s going to have to fight.
The James Goss online short story from the TARDIS’s point of view is the key that explains it all, and the various threads (the Dalek animation, the eighth Doctor audios) were mainly just backstory. The key pieces are the Goss story, the Una McCormack novel, and the eight/ten audio drama. It does hang together, but making each strand self-contained also made large parts inessential.
The marketing for the event was poor and made it sound like a tenth Doctor event about “abolishing death.” The Koturrah (the bringers of death from another universe) are just a Macguffin, the Dark Times didn’t feel appreciably different than any other time or place in the Whoniverse, and the eighth Doctor does the heavy lifting against the story’s real foe (ie., the Daleks).