I finished writing about all of Babylon 5 a year back, so this brings my total completed TV shows up to... 2. I was supposed to have finished Star Trek: Picard by now as well, but I had to put it on hold due to a new season of Doctor Who appearing and demanding a slice of my time.
Star Trek: Discovery began in late 2017, but I started writing about it way earlier, when the first teaser trailer was released. It was just a reveal of the hero ship but I was so damn hyped for new Trek that I wrote about it anyway. Now it's five years later and I'm writing about Discovery's fifth and final season. Sorry, I mean eight years later, as they were kind of dragging their heels on releasing season 5.
There have been plenty of people who wrote the show off as being a ratings disaster and said it was going to get cancelled before its time, and I suppose it did. Oh well. But it's eerie how close it's run mirrors Star Trek: The Next Generation's, exactly 30 years later. TNG ran from Sep 1987 to May 1994, Disco went from Sep 2017 to May 2024. In fact, if you count the days from The Vulcan Hello to the release of Life, Itself, Discovery is actually the longest running Star Trek series of all time by 11 days!
Was the fifth season any good though? Was any of it any good? I'll be sharing my own thoughts below, so expect a few SPOILERS for Discovery, Picard, and other Trek.
But Discovery did eventually come back and it was nostalgic seeing all the old sets again, looking exactly as they did all those years ago. To my surprise I found I was happy to be back on the USS Discovery again, with my old friends Saru, Detmer and Owo. Then they all left because the actors were busy with other things, but at least Tilly and Book stuck around on the ship this time!
There is very little Admiral Vance, President Rillek and President T'Rina here as well and I'm considering that to be a good thing. The absence of authority figures makes it feel like Burnham has passed her captains exams now and she gets to call the shots. She has nothing left to prove to her crew or Starfleet. Though this time she has to prove she's worthy enough to be a god.
I'll give the writers credit, they really made Discovery feel like a science vessel this season as the team worked to solve each of the clues. Sure some of them got a bit spiritual at times, but that comes with the territory when you're on a quest to find the source of humanoid life and the meaning of existence. The journey was always going to be more important than the destination with a story like this, as Holy Grails always get dropped or archived, so it was a smart idea I reckon to make the season arc an episodic chain of tests and lessons. The Progenitors seeded humanoid life across the galaxy because they were lonely, we knew this from the start, so the season had to show off the diversity of life in the galaxy in order to make the point that the job's already done and the technology is now redundant. The galaxy's all set up for endless star treks and we have super-fast spaceships, so we don't need God Burnham, only Captain Burnham.
Okay this is weird, why am I being so positive about a season of Discovery? I mean, I liked the show from the start, but I've never been able to give it my whole heart as there's always been something absurd or frustrating that's dragged me out of my immersion.
- Season 1 attempted to reinvent Star Trek as an edgy mature drama where the Klingons have giant rubber masks.
- Season 2's Red Angel plot made no damn sense and Burnham seemed to cry in every episode.
- Season 3 kept setting up interesting season arcs and then abandoning them, until what we had left was a kid's scream blowing up all the dilithium in the galaxy and Burnham fighting in an endless turbolift chamber.
- And season 4 was a bit of a repetitive slog written by aliens with limited knowledge of human conversation who were sent to our world to encourage Star Trek viewers to 'connect'.
THE BAD
Though to be fair, they did actually make use of the feature when they pulled the nacelles in before ramming the whole ship into a Breen dreadnought's shuttlebay. Also they weld them back onto the ship again at the end of the finale, so really I've got nothing to complain about anymore.
The ship got a whole makeover for the epilogue to look like it did in Calypso, and I would file this in the 'good' category, except they never explain why! It was a case of "Oh damn, we got cancelled, and now we only have a few minutes to establish that Calypso really does take place in our timeline before the end credits roll! Plus it was a bit of a dark note to end the series on, considering what happens to Zora. But hey at least no one actually got killed off in a dumb way that would've tarnished the season forever, so it's a better ending than Enterprise got.
Star Trek's 32nd century version of Bonnie and Clyde didn't turn out to be all that fun or charismatic in the end, and that's a shame as they weren't much of anything else either. I couldn't imagine any character having an interesting conversation with either of these two and neither could the writers. They did try with Book, but his arc with Moll ended up feeling more like setup for season 6 with how unresolved it was.
Also, L'ak had too much rubber on his face and it impeded the actor's performance. Five seasons in and the show was still making the same mistake that they made with the Klingons in season 1. Though at least in this case they weren't retconning anything about the Breen, just fleshing them out a bit. Or whatever they have in place of flesh.
And like (almost) all Discovery villains, he had to have his own gigantic super ship that utterly dwarfed anything Starfleet had. This is the fourth time now that Discovery's had to take down one of these ships! Though to be fair, they always do it in a different way, and 'spore jumping them to the far end of the galaxy' definitely counts as different.
It's funny how Discovery herself pretty much counts as ancient godlike technology with all the things it can do. Maybe that's why Starfleet abandoned it in a nebula at the end: they wanted to set up a new treasure hunt! Solve six clues and get a sentient starship that can teleport across the galaxy and turn its bridge into a Rammstein concert.
The production crew tried to go more dramatic with the fight scenes as well, as Moll's fights seem to have been filmed from a nearby rollercoaster. It's hard to judge the choreography when the camera's swooping under a biobed and doing flips, but I'm thinking it was probably bad.
On the other hand, things like Burnham riding a spaceship through warp and the bike chase looked fine. They did a nice job there. The trouble is, the characters weren't doing anything! They just had a pretty CGI backdrop to their conversations. In fact, the best action scene in the whole season for me was Rayner and Book taking out all the Breen at the library and that was mostly implied.
Oh, speaking of Rayner...
THE GOOD
Captain Rayner was basically Discovery's version of Star Trek: Picard's Captain Shaw. Both characters are a bit harder-edged and difficult, both have a deep trauma influencing their actions, and both are played by actors who do a great job in the role. The difference is that I never once questioned how Rayner ever made it to the captain's chair. I may have questioned why he was avoiding the chair during a few episodes, but the guy seemed like a competent commander who'd made a few bad choices. And when he stopped behaving like someone in his position should, Starfleet booted him out.
I'm not saying that Shaw should've been kicked out of Starfleet for his behavior, but maybe a couple of demotions would've helped. He would've made a much better grumpy chief engineer than a captain.
Anyway, Rayner wasn't the only major change to Discovery's bridge crew.
Way back in my season 1 review I said that I either wanted the recurring bridge officers to be given a Chief O'Brien upgrade and become actual recurring characters, or I wanted them to be replaced by anonymous extras. Well, they went with second option, kind of, and I thought the season was a lot better for it.
Non-character limbo suits people like Linus, who gets to be a punchline and then disappear behind his station out of sight, but it was just getting annoying that five years in Owosekun and Detmer were still characters that the producers loved, rather than characters they ever did anything with. They were like a pair of potential Nogs permanently stuck in a Morn role. On the other hand, Jemison is just 'the woman who came in after Gallo left'. And who even knows who Gallo is? I don't give a damn about any of these people! And that's a good thing. It puts the focus squarely on the characters whose names appear in the opening credits.
Saru has a different problem, as he's a starship captain in a series where Burnham has to be the captain. Demoting him to first officer never felt right, so sending him off to promote the movie Hocus Pocus 2 wasn't the worst outcome. He did a good job when he came back in the finale, but I couldn't miss him until he went away. And I definitely didn't miss his relationship arc with T'Rina. It might have worked for other people, I don't know, but it didn't work for me.
But that's fine, as the focus was mostly on the main quest, and that storyline worked. Sure it has weak villains, fairly non-existent character arcs, and it ends with them just throwing the fish back, but there's never any point where you ask 'where is this season even going?' It doesn't meander, it doesn't waste your time, and it doesn't set up ideas and then abandon them. It says right at the start "We're going to have a series of Star Trek adventures, visit some nice planets, solve a bunch of puzzles that test Burnham's character, and then at the end of the season we collect our treasure," and that's what you get. Well, they destroyed the treasure, but you know what I mean.
And it gave me a proper Burnham and Tilly away mission on a planet! That's something else I said I wanted in my season 1 review, so... better late than never I guess.
STAR TREK: DISCOVERY SERIES REVIEW
But over time the series has been settling down into something resembling normality. In fact, Discovery's arc has kind of mirrored Michael Burnham's. At the start it was reckless and violent and the centre of its own universe. It got to make big choices, which led to big emotional moments and big mistakes. But in its heart it always believed in the spirit of Star Trek and it developed over time. Sometimes it changed because of behind-the-scenes chaos, but a lot of the time it seemed like the writers were paying attention to feedback and adapting. The unwelcome Klingon redesign was walked back a little before being dropped entirely, the crew became more of a family, Burnham stopped crying every episode, the turbolift dimension was forgotten, and at the end there was more focus on space adventure than mental health. But at the same time, I get the impression that it never stopped being what the writers wanted it to be. Season 5 still has the scenes between characters where they reassure each other, they're just implemented much better.
Some people say that the show started off wanting to be Game of Thrones or Battlestar Galactica and ended up as a sentimental CW show. Having rewatched some of season one Arrow and The Flash recently, I think that CW side of it was there from the start. Discovery started off with ongoing mysteries, crazy twists and shocking reveals, along with comic book levels of contrivances and bullshit science, and everything existed to torment the heroic protagonist at the centre of the universe. By season 5 though, Discovery had pretty much reached a typical Star Trek level of weirdness and drama. Face the Strange is no stranger than Voyager's Shattered and Whistlespeak is just old school Trek. I think the series has lost something as it's matured, as it's gone from being a thrilling rollercoaster of insanity to something more restrained and predictable, but it's also gained a lot as well. It escaped from the darkness that comes from trauma and war and a fallen Federation, and by the end it was building upon the franchise's mythology instead of contradicting it. Overall, I'd call Discovery's fifth season a success.
In fact, overall I'd call Discovery a success. It's never been my favourite Star Trek, especially since Lower Decks does the 'demoted officer deals with her demons and figures herself out' story much better and is just a smarter show in general, but it's never been my least favourite either. It's... fine. Sometimes it looked amazing, sometimes it looked like a blue-tinted nightmare. It had a great cast, sometimes it actually made good use of them. It made great leaps when it comes to representation and diversity in Star Trek, and some of those characters weren't entirely tedious to watch. It never really had the substance of Next Gen or Deep Space Nine, but it did grow to become more thoughtful I thought.
They could've done more with that displacement-activated spore hub drive though. Discovery can teleport anywhere in the galaxy in an instant and aside from the occasional trip to Terralysium, the Guardian of Forever or the Galactic Barrier they basically only used the spore drive to shave a few hours off a trip they could've done with their warp drive! They've could've visited any alien world from all of Star Trek, the Delta and Gamma Quadrants were entirely open to them, and what was got was the Vulcans and some caves on Trill. World building and exploration was not this series' strength.
But even at the show's lowest points I was always eager to watch the next episode, sometimes even more than the episode I was currently watching! And for all its flaws, the series did achieve its primary objective of telling the legend of Michael Burnham. The sister of Spock and daughter of the Red Angel. Starfleet's first mutineer and the woman who ended the Klingon War. Saviour of all organic life in the galaxy and restorer of the Federation. Protector of the worlds of Earth and Ni'Var. Worthy successor to the Progenitors. Wife, mother. Captain of Discovery.
Top three Discovery season 5 episodes:
- Erigah (9)
- Under the Twin Moons (8)
- Whistlespeak (7)
Bottom three season 5 episodes:
- Lagrange Point (7)
- Mirrors (6)
- Jinaal (5)
It's been a while since I watched the older episodes and I doubt I'd be as impressed by some of them on the second time around, but here is where I'm at right now when it comes to my top (and bottom) episodes of the entire series overall:
Top ten Star Trek: Discovery episodes:
- 2-13 - Such Sweet Sorrow (10)
- 1-13 - What's Past is Prologue (10)
- 1-09 - Into the Forest I Go (9)
- 5-07 - Erigah (9)
- 2-09 - Project Daedalus (9)
- 1-10 - Despite Yourself (9)
- 2-01 - Brother (8)
- 4-06 - Stormy Weather (8)
- 2-04 - An Obol for Charon (8)
- 3-01 - That Hope is You, Part 1 (8)
I guess I just really like the episodes where Burnham's fighting the bad guy on the enemy super ship's bridge while Discovery swoops in to blow it up and then do some crazy multiverse hopping with its spore drive. Even if they're like 4 episodes apart.
Bottom ten Star Trek: Discovery episodes:
- 1-11 - The Wolf Inside (6)
- 5-05 - Mirrors (6)
- 4-11 - Rosetta (6)
- 4-10 - The Galactic Barrier (6)
- 4-05 - The Examples (6)
- 4-04 - All is Possible (6)
- 5-03 - Jinaal (5)
- 3-11 - Su'kal (5)
- 3-12 - There is a Tide... (5)
- 1-08 - Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum (5)
Next time on Star Trek: Discovery:
What do I want from Discovery next? I want a movie that explains why the hell they condemned Zora to endure a thousand years of isolation.
And I want the Starfleet Academy spin-off to be good. I don't know how they could manage that, but it's theoretically possible and Star Trek is all about working through seemingly hopeless problems.
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COMING SOON
Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the 6th episode of Doctor Who's latest season, Rogue!
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