Redshirts Roundtable: The Outlook of Star Trek Discovery
Star Trek Discovery Pike, Burnham & Saru
Welcome to the Redshirts Always Die Roundtable, a new feature where we take a hot topic and open it to all of our writers to chime in and share their thoughts. For our first edition we’re looking at Star Trek Discovery.
It’s safe to say that Star Trek Discovery has had a bumpy road to get to where it is today, with a series of changes to the writers, showrunners, species, stories and even overall episodic nature and series formula the deck seems to be stacked against them.
From the announcement of the new look Klingons, the exit of Bryan Fuller, the release date delay, and streaming on a paid service in the United States, many fans began a campaign against the series before ever having watched a single frame of footage.
As the series came out there was a further backlash over the D.A.S.H. Drive, which allows for a more Battletar Galactica form of travel, as opposed to a Star Trek form of travel, and then there’s the reported similarities to a video game which featured a giant blue tardigrades and characters resembling the crew of the USS Discovery which is currently in the courts but is unlikely to have any lasting effects on the series.
The war was another issue for many Star Trek purists, despite the themes of war having been deeply explored over the course of several seasons of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, it was somehow perceived to be a negative for Star Trek Discovery to feature a canonically accurate war during it’s first season.
Since Alex Kurtzman was installed as the new all things Star Trek runner for CBS as a part of his own five-year mission to explore new content and boldly launch shows nobody would ever have launched before, we have seen some pretty major course corrections for Discovery as a whole, the Klingons have been quietly transformed back to their Next Generation era look and their earlier appearance actually reasonably explained, if you look past the shape of the backs of some of their heads, the war is over and we’re into some far more classic Trek territory overall.
So now I put the question to the roundtable, what is your overall opinion of Star Trek Discovery and has the second season changed that opinion at all?