Note: I originally posted this to Cohost, but wanted to make it more generally available, beyond a preview in Friday's social media roundup post.
(OK, but for all the people halving the name to call the ship Disco, why not use the entire name and make it very disco, and drop a mirrored ball...?)
Since I wrote something wrapping up Picard when it ended, it felt reasonable to do something similar for Star Trek: Discovery, a show that I actually mostly enjoyed. Unlike the rest of this "third generation" of the franchise, Discovery always seemed to want to break the mold and actually explore new (conceptual) space, even if it didn't always get there. Or as I describe it in my snarkier moments, the only show (OK, along with Prodigy) in the modern franchise not trying to constantly convince me that I'd feel better watching TNG instead.
No, really.
Let's take a look at the franchise as it stands.
I won't discuss Discovery in this one line, since the entire post will talk about it...
Picard occasionally tried to do other things, but it always reverted to posing as the thirty-third through thirty-fifth seasons of TNG, especially ending as it does with an explicit "get the gang back together, because nothing else matters" final season.
Lower Decks, through its design, choice of plots, and overall approach to storytelling all but openly worships TNG, refusing to criticize anything that the earlier show did, beyond "did you laugh at that?" It'll mention, reference, and homage other shows, but usually as "the DS9 episode" or equivalent. (see footnote)
Prodigy felt aimless early on, but found a plot that it mostly stuck to until the season finale when they told us that none of it really mattered...but maybe it'll figure out what to do now that they've cancelled and resurrected it.
Strange New Worlds started out as backdoor pilots on Discovery where Pike made a weirdly big deal about feeling persecuted for his religion (despite the lack of evidence of such), then went on to have episodes with heavy-handed morals about how we need to compromise more with fascists to prevent fascist insurrections, respect religions that want everybody to die, not to mention that you need to oppress people or else they might gain power in the government and stop the oppression. Along the way, it seems to have the thesis that the original series should embarrass us with its progressive messaging, and that Star Trek only truly works when you model the crew as a patriarchal family, and I can't see it as anything but a plea to reboot the original series with TNG's aesthetic, and none of those pesky stories about how we stop killing each other only by deciding not to kill when presented with the option.
Meanwhile, let's quickly review how Discovery tried to do things.
Season 1 starts out using the Klingons as a metaphor for a certain "basket of deplorables." Because Star Trek* has always had some of the worst fans, they backed off on that and dumped the crew into the Mirror Universe, followed by the aftermath of a war, lest we forget to blame Burnham for (double-checking my notes...) doing exactly the right thing in the pilot, and only failing because they stopped her.
Season 2 backdoors Strange New Worlds while also assuring angry fans that, no, don't worry, Discovery will never have any impact on the parts of the franchise that anybody cares about.
Season 3 changes its mind every couple of episodes about what it wants to do with its distant future, especially with The Burn™, which could've sensibly resulted from Discovery's impromptu trip to the future (not noticing the similarity between Burn and Burnham seems implausible), or the fallout from that TNG episode telling us that warp drive would eventually destroy subspace, or almost anything else, but instead we got a child throwing tantrums, I guess because Doug Jones wanted more screen time.
Season 4 did a much better job of holding things together, largely tried to get a two-part episode to make sense stretched across thirteen episodes.
Season 5 finally succumbs to TNG-fealty by making an entire season's worth of sequel to The Chase, and had a lot of fun with the concept, but...well, I wrote this post for that.
I go through all this to make the point that Discovery always felt like a huge outlier in the franchise, both in its ambitions and in its seeming inability to achieve those ambitions for whatever reason.
About that Fifth Season...
Your opinions might differ, and I have no problem with that. However, I saw two huge problems with this final season. But at this point, I feel like anybody still watching the show does so for the solid performances, not anything like a consistent plot structure.
In any case, we have the first problem of the goofiest cluster of antagonists that I've ever seen in this franchise. OK, maybe they come in ahead of Sybok's cult in The Final Frontier that, ignoring the "evil god" part that literally nobody knew about ahead of time, looks suspiciously like a bunch of poor people coming together for mutual support after their governments abandoned them. But the Breen started out as blank slates, and...continue to look a lot like blank slates. And L'ak and Moll...I mean, seriously, "moll" comes right out of 1930s slang for a woman (often stereotyped as a sex worker) who spends time around gangsters. In other words, everything about the season's "villains" feels like placeholders that they forgot to revise, and none of them really have any effect on the story, never learning anything that Burnham doesn't, and never forcing anybody on Discovery to reconsider their assumptions.
The other problem arises from the fact that we all could've guessed the ending based on the fact that the macguffin-tech serves no legitimate purpose. Star Trek has never had a population collapse for the characters to worry about. Their distant future barely has the capacity to forge alliances with old friends, let alone start a massive campaign of colonization. Nobody seems threatened with extinction unless they can evolve into their new environment. Other than keeping the technology out of everyone's hands, then, going on the scavenger hunt makes no sense.
Not All Bad
That said, they did some fun things (and some inane things) with the scavenger hunt. But I wish that we had gotten a more intense puzzle with more steps and less of the surly teen (played by someone who should have aged out of that role a long time ago) obsessed with her older rebel boyfriend.
Likewise, introducing Rayner as the worst kind of Star Trek fan delighted me, from his forcing his way into scenes to grump about the show "wasting" time on Burnham and Book's relationship beats to complaining that we haven't gotten to the pew-pew-pew part of the episode, and might (gasp) solve a problem with diplomacy. And rehabilitating him mostly felt credible, with so many characters sharing the load of telling him off.
The season also finally figured out how to not waste Mary Wiseman. Previous seasons have inappropriately modeled Tilly on a stereotypical Star Trek fan, the smart-but-awkward kid who thinks that their knowledge of the franchise will help them succeed in life. I mean, they literally introduced her as secretly wanting to eventually become a captain, calling into question why you would ever join an organization like Starfleet if not to get promoted to more interesting positions. But this season, they ditch all that awful affect, and make her someone who leads through compassion, which makes a lot more sense for Wiseman's acting range.
Add in some modern Federation politics and intrigue (often camouflaged as Saru having relationship issues), something that the other shows seem terrified to think about lest someone not see their version of the Federation as anything but utopian, and they could've had some great television to close out the series.
Literally Last but Not Least...
In a lot of ways, the finale had a strong chance to fix the problems. Instead, it...
It...
Honestly, I don't know what that final episode tried to do.
We spent way too much time smacking around the aforementioned surly teen and pretending that she had anything to contribute to the story. We blow past the inevitable revelation - as the season did by not pointing out its absurdity - that no, creating life doesn't mean that you can resurrect the dead, something that anybody who as ever encountered a pregnant person or other animal could've told you.
We also spent far too much time on a battle that ended - as the season should've begun - with everybody agreeing to skip the Breen nonsense and move on.
And the resolution makes no sense. Yes, I called it inevitable before, because nobody has any legitimate use for the technology. But they know that it presents a danger, and decide to leave it to fate, because Burnham decided that the galaxy has enough diversity in it, which feel like something that the franchise doesn't want to teach. I could've imagined a Prime Directive argument, where creating a new species would absolutely constitute interfering with its development. I could've imagined a political argument calling for its destruction, because Kovich and Section 31 can absolutely piece together everything that they need to know to capture the technology and use it against the Federation's perceived enemies. But "nah, man, we have plenty of diversity" feels like the worst outcome.
And what the heck happened with Nhan? She helps to save the day, because she - Saru's words, not mine - considers Discovery family, and then takes a nap during the big reunion scene?
The epilogue, though? It would've made me much happier to fast-forward through the conclusion so that we could spend more time seeing how Sonequa Martin-Green would look if the make-up team accentuated her resemblance to Nichelle Nichols in her later years, and maybe give us some other futures. If we spent less time with space-battles, maybe we could've given the recurring cast some closure and a future, since we so rarely check in with them other to verify that they still exist...
Err...Just One More Thing, Ma'am.
(Insert Peter Falk impression here.)
Why does Admiral Burnham ditch Discovery at a specific position to wait for Craft?
It probably doesn't matter, but it seems to me that no character would know (or care, for that matter) about what happened in a fourteen-minute short from six years ago, taking place a thousand years in the future. Stranger, we already knew most of Zora's side of that background from that Short Treks episode, but this does nothing to enlighten us about how Craft would've gotten there.
It does raise the new question of why the Federation would care enough about Craft to explain it, especially given Paramount's financial situation definitely not suggestive of an impending series starring Aldis Hodge.
Anyway...
Regardless of my quibbling, I'll miss Discovery in a way that I haven't missed and won't miss the rest of the modern shows. I could've done with a lot more of this show consistently stumbling than the disinterested polish of last-man-standing Strange New Worlds...
Footnote 1: Seriously, to me, most of the shows feel like that Pluto TV commercial where the science fiction manager breaks into some poor guy's house, openly slavering over the prospect of getting him to watch TNG...