Clearly Back in the Star Trek Groove
Mar. 10th, 2025 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI’m going ahead with a cut for this, because it’s very long and includes commentary and spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3), Star Trek: Picard (Seasons 1-2), and Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 5).
Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3) – As a Star Trek fan, I know that playing “fast and loose” with continuity is pretty much required to tell interesting stories. But by the same token, it annoys me after recently rewatching TNG how much Discovery has to flat-out ignore to make these plots work: “The Burn” decimating the Federation is reliant on there being no other forms of warp engines, but there are multiple instances where the Romulans using captive singularities are major plot points; not to mention all of the other FTL options Voyager discovered. They treat Dilithium like it’s fuel, when it’s well-established that it’s a regulator for antimatter and they’ve been able to recrystallize it (and use any given piece indefinitely) since Scotty invented that technique in Star Trek 4. The Trill episode has a line about them “running out of hosts,” which is absurd because there was an entire DS9 plotline around the fact that most Trill are eligible hosts and the priests lie about that because symbiotes are in short supply.
The one thing I will accept is the fact their Universal Translators don’t work on a bunch of the new languages: They have TOS-era translators, which were crappy and slow enough that ships still kept a dedicated linguist on the bridge.
But most critically they have NO IDEA how long 900 years is in terms of technological development in the Star Trek universe. Discovery is treated like Kirk’s Enterprise showing up in Picard’s time: Out of date, well-behind the power curve, but still functional and certainly useful. What it actually should be is like showing up to the modern-day US navy with a Viking longboat. (But that’s okay, because most of the 32nd century technology we see is only slightly advanced from what Voyager dealt with weekly.) Honestly, this all would have made more sense if they set it in the 27th century instead of the 32nd; Picard ends in 2401 and the temporal cold wars from Enterprise are launched from the 2500s. The temporal accords are signed, the Federation barely starts to recover and then the Burn hits before 2600, then instead of jumping to 3188 Discovery lands in 2688 and you don’t have to account for 500 more years of cultural shifts and technological development.
Ah, well. I suspect there’s also a rant to be had about how you can’t remember any specific episode because they’re almost all just interstitial pieces of the ongoing season-length plot. This show really needed to contain the various events more to specific episodes and let them breathe with some interim “monster of the week” episodes.
Oh, and it’s weird how much this is the Michael show versus the ensemble casts of every other Trek show. Like, you could argue that Saru, Tilly, and maybe Stametz and Culver are equivalent to the usual bridge crew; but everyone else (including the actual bridge crew!) are like TNG-era O’Brien or Barclay: Recurring characters who get personalities and occasional plots that focus on them, but very much not the main cast.
Star Trek: Picard (Season 1) – I realize I watched these out of order, but the same producers were clearly involved, as the destruction of the Romulan sun and the Romulan Empire is an inciting factor of the events of this season. (They also have 90% of the technology that Discovery encounters 800 years later, making that same stagnation problem rather insane.) This was clearly written by people who thought the “dark underbelly of the Federation” episodes of DS9 were the best Star Trek had to offer and they wanted more of that; but Stewart was available and a bigger draw than Brooks was. It doesn’t feel like a sequel series to TNG—it feels like a grim-and-gritty ragtag-crew generalized universe sequel that has a bigger budget than Star Trek: Renegades but the same aims.
At least they fridged two male Borg to motivate Seven rather than fridging a female character? That’s slightly progressive, right? (Also, it’ll be interesting to see if anything comes of it in later seasons, but the ending seems to imply something romantic between Raffi and Seven.)
Also, the writers had a thesis that isn’t explicitly stated but is obvious if you look for it: The universe would have been much better off if Data didn’t sacrifice himself for Picard in Nemesis. The synth ban wouldn’t have happened because there would never have been a line of easy-compromised, non-Soong-type androids and even if there were nobody would ever allow a ban that included Data. Riker and Troi’s son would have been cured and survive if Data was around. Picard had no real impact on the Romulan rescue effort in the end; and he’s been a useless hermit for the 14 years following. I suspect the only reason this show wasn’t Star Trek: Data Lives! is because Spiner didn’t want to spend 10 episodes in heavy pancake makeup with a slew of body doubles for every scene.
Jethrien and I also came up with extensive theories on how the men of the Soong family must be normal until around middle age (so they’re able to get married, have children, build carriers, etc) and then all go nuts and become crazy hermit mad scientists. Noonien Soong rivals Spock in his ability to pull previous-unmentioned family members out of nowhere, but they’re all reliably people you’d never want to be around so it’s understandable they would be estranged from each other.
(The one thing they do totally get credit for: The Federation maintained a centuries-long ban on genetic augmentation because of Kahn. Yes, they would definitely ban all synthetic life forever because of one terrorist attack that they clearly didn’t even adequately investigate. Oh, and the deep-cover, extremely high-up Romulan agent is also par for the course; that’s like the third or fourth time it’s happened.)
Star Trek: Picard (Season 2) – This season brings back Q and Guinan for a last hurrah with both, as Picard and his new supporting cast get tossed into an alternate timeline and then solar-singleshot to 2024 (with a bunch of clear references to Voyage Home) to fix the timeline where Q broke it. They also spend a lot of time with a guardian of the timeline called Taillin, who is clearly supposed to be from the same organization as Gary Seven from TOS.
Don’t think too hard about how the timeline had to work regarding the TNG episode “Time’s Arrow”, why the events with the Borg Queen didn’t disrupt the entire history of the Borg, or why the timelines seemed to match before and after the changes despite the crew definitively “stepping on butterflies.” (Among other things, the Confederation technology shouldn’t have ever existed once they removed that timeline and but the Borg from that timeline existed in the main timeline even before they left…oh dear I’ve got cross-eyed.) Q clearly smoothed it all out when he sent them back; let’s go with that.
Wil Wheaton makes a one-scene cameo to properly establish Wesley Crusher’s future fate: As a Traveler, he’s one of the group who recruits and assigns the timeline guardians. Which I think it what both the Wesley fans of yore and Wheaton himself always hoped for. That did make me happy.
And I have to wonder if they signed a bunch of returning actors before they’d quite worked out the plot and the episode structure for this season; hence needing a suspiciously-identical ancestor, an Emergency Combat Hologram, and yet another father-daughter pair of Soongs. (“We contracted him for five episodes. I don’t care if he’s dead, work him in!”)
Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 5) – Whereas this just continues to love Star Trek and have a good time with the deep cuts and the fun scenarios. It’s rare that a TV show is so very much “for” me, but this one is. I suspect that if the series ran significantly longer it would have started getting tiring; but as it stood they hit a wonderful collection of cameos, callbacks, new jokes, character development, and semi-canonical events. Also, by ending with the creation of a stable wormhole into alternate timelines/mirror universes (which reinforces the canon multiverse of the Trek universe), it opens the door for a way to deal with a lot of continuity snarls and retcons: Didn’t like a season of Discovery? That’s fine, it happened in a different way in the “Prime” universe.
Honestly, there’s an argument to be made that with all of the temporal cold wars and timey-whimey shenanigans over the years that NOTHING we’ve seen on screen (or in comics, novels, etc) perfectly matches the “real” current history of the Star Trek universe and that El-Aurians are just known as “the species who have continuous migraines.”
Overall: While it doesn’t match old Trek in tone and format, I have been enjoying new Trek, and I have three more seasons of various shows still to go. And I’ll probably rewatch more old Trek while I’m at it. It’s a good time for optimistic, competent, and collaborative sci-fi universes.
Star Trek: Discovery (Season 3) – As a Star Trek fan, I know that playing “fast and loose” with continuity is pretty much required to tell interesting stories. But by the same token, it annoys me after recently rewatching TNG how much Discovery has to flat-out ignore to make these plots work: “The Burn” decimating the Federation is reliant on there being no other forms of warp engines, but there are multiple instances where the Romulans using captive singularities are major plot points; not to mention all of the other FTL options Voyager discovered. They treat Dilithium like it’s fuel, when it’s well-established that it’s a regulator for antimatter and they’ve been able to recrystallize it (and use any given piece indefinitely) since Scotty invented that technique in Star Trek 4. The Trill episode has a line about them “running out of hosts,” which is absurd because there was an entire DS9 plotline around the fact that most Trill are eligible hosts and the priests lie about that because symbiotes are in short supply.
The one thing I will accept is the fact their Universal Translators don’t work on a bunch of the new languages: They have TOS-era translators, which were crappy and slow enough that ships still kept a dedicated linguist on the bridge.
But most critically they have NO IDEA how long 900 years is in terms of technological development in the Star Trek universe. Discovery is treated like Kirk’s Enterprise showing up in Picard’s time: Out of date, well-behind the power curve, but still functional and certainly useful. What it actually should be is like showing up to the modern-day US navy with a Viking longboat. (But that’s okay, because most of the 32nd century technology we see is only slightly advanced from what Voyager dealt with weekly.) Honestly, this all would have made more sense if they set it in the 27th century instead of the 32nd; Picard ends in 2401 and the temporal cold wars from Enterprise are launched from the 2500s. The temporal accords are signed, the Federation barely starts to recover and then the Burn hits before 2600, then instead of jumping to 3188 Discovery lands in 2688 and you don’t have to account for 500 more years of cultural shifts and technological development.
Ah, well. I suspect there’s also a rant to be had about how you can’t remember any specific episode because they’re almost all just interstitial pieces of the ongoing season-length plot. This show really needed to contain the various events more to specific episodes and let them breathe with some interim “monster of the week” episodes.
Oh, and it’s weird how much this is the Michael show versus the ensemble casts of every other Trek show. Like, you could argue that Saru, Tilly, and maybe Stametz and Culver are equivalent to the usual bridge crew; but everyone else (including the actual bridge crew!) are like TNG-era O’Brien or Barclay: Recurring characters who get personalities and occasional plots that focus on them, but very much not the main cast.
Star Trek: Picard (Season 1) – I realize I watched these out of order, but the same producers were clearly involved, as the destruction of the Romulan sun and the Romulan Empire is an inciting factor of the events of this season. (They also have 90% of the technology that Discovery encounters 800 years later, making that same stagnation problem rather insane.) This was clearly written by people who thought the “dark underbelly of the Federation” episodes of DS9 were the best Star Trek had to offer and they wanted more of that; but Stewart was available and a bigger draw than Brooks was. It doesn’t feel like a sequel series to TNG—it feels like a grim-and-gritty ragtag-crew generalized universe sequel that has a bigger budget than Star Trek: Renegades but the same aims.
At least they fridged two male Borg to motivate Seven rather than fridging a female character? That’s slightly progressive, right? (Also, it’ll be interesting to see if anything comes of it in later seasons, but the ending seems to imply something romantic between Raffi and Seven.)
Also, the writers had a thesis that isn’t explicitly stated but is obvious if you look for it: The universe would have been much better off if Data didn’t sacrifice himself for Picard in Nemesis. The synth ban wouldn’t have happened because there would never have been a line of easy-compromised, non-Soong-type androids and even if there were nobody would ever allow a ban that included Data. Riker and Troi’s son would have been cured and survive if Data was around. Picard had no real impact on the Romulan rescue effort in the end; and he’s been a useless hermit for the 14 years following. I suspect the only reason this show wasn’t Star Trek: Data Lives! is because Spiner didn’t want to spend 10 episodes in heavy pancake makeup with a slew of body doubles for every scene.
Jethrien and I also came up with extensive theories on how the men of the Soong family must be normal until around middle age (so they’re able to get married, have children, build carriers, etc) and then all go nuts and become crazy hermit mad scientists. Noonien Soong rivals Spock in his ability to pull previous-unmentioned family members out of nowhere, but they’re all reliably people you’d never want to be around so it’s understandable they would be estranged from each other.
(The one thing they do totally get credit for: The Federation maintained a centuries-long ban on genetic augmentation because of Kahn. Yes, they would definitely ban all synthetic life forever because of one terrorist attack that they clearly didn’t even adequately investigate. Oh, and the deep-cover, extremely high-up Romulan agent is also par for the course; that’s like the third or fourth time it’s happened.)
Star Trek: Picard (Season 2) – This season brings back Q and Guinan for a last hurrah with both, as Picard and his new supporting cast get tossed into an alternate timeline and then solar-singleshot to 2024 (with a bunch of clear references to Voyage Home) to fix the timeline where Q broke it. They also spend a lot of time with a guardian of the timeline called Taillin, who is clearly supposed to be from the same organization as Gary Seven from TOS.
Don’t think too hard about how the timeline had to work regarding the TNG episode “Time’s Arrow”, why the events with the Borg Queen didn’t disrupt the entire history of the Borg, or why the timelines seemed to match before and after the changes despite the crew definitively “stepping on butterflies.” (Among other things, the Confederation technology shouldn’t have ever existed once they removed that timeline and but the Borg from that timeline existed in the main timeline even before they left…oh dear I’ve got cross-eyed.) Q clearly smoothed it all out when he sent them back; let’s go with that.
Wil Wheaton makes a one-scene cameo to properly establish Wesley Crusher’s future fate: As a Traveler, he’s one of the group who recruits and assigns the timeline guardians. Which I think it what both the Wesley fans of yore and Wheaton himself always hoped for. That did make me happy.
And I have to wonder if they signed a bunch of returning actors before they’d quite worked out the plot and the episode structure for this season; hence needing a suspiciously-identical ancestor, an Emergency Combat Hologram, and yet another father-daughter pair of Soongs. (“We contracted him for five episodes. I don’t care if he’s dead, work him in!”)
Star Trek: Lower Decks (Season 5) – Whereas this just continues to love Star Trek and have a good time with the deep cuts and the fun scenarios. It’s rare that a TV show is so very much “for” me, but this one is. I suspect that if the series ran significantly longer it would have started getting tiring; but as it stood they hit a wonderful collection of cameos, callbacks, new jokes, character development, and semi-canonical events. Also, by ending with the creation of a stable wormhole into alternate timelines/mirror universes (which reinforces the canon multiverse of the Trek universe), it opens the door for a way to deal with a lot of continuity snarls and retcons: Didn’t like a season of Discovery? That’s fine, it happened in a different way in the “Prime” universe.
Honestly, there’s an argument to be made that with all of the temporal cold wars and timey-whimey shenanigans over the years that NOTHING we’ve seen on screen (or in comics, novels, etc) perfectly matches the “real” current history of the Star Trek universe and that El-Aurians are just known as “the species who have continuous migraines.”
Overall: While it doesn’t match old Trek in tone and format, I have been enjoying new Trek, and I have three more seasons of various shows still to go. And I’ll probably rewatch more old Trek while I’m at it. It’s a good time for optimistic, competent, and collaborative sci-fi universes.
