Star Trek: Does a show need to be concluded to determine it’s quality?

Fans all over the place are debating the quality of the new Star Trek series, prompting some to argue you can’t judge a show until it’s over.

Reading through comments can be a very exciting experience when running a blog-site. You get to see a lot of people’s opinions, hear their hopes, their fears, if they like something or don’t and oftentimes you’ll see recurring posters reply. It’s usually very interesting. Reading through some posts on the sites Facebook page brought a quote that really had some people thinking;

"{The series} isn’t finished, so you can’t really say, ‘I don’t like it.’"

That’s a unique take, one that doesn’t have a lot of legs, however. The idea of symmetry just doesn’t exist in the world of television reviews. Just because it’s one way for one view, does not mean it’s another way for another view. For instance, a great final season doesn’t make a show that’s been up and down for years somehow great. Yet, a bad final season, like in Game of Thrones or How I Met Your Mother could and often does ruin the entire show.

Essentially, it’s much easier to justify a dislike of a show (or film or album or whatever) than it is to justify loving it. For something to be universally good, it has to start good and end good with very little in between that isn’t. For it to be universally great, it has to start great, end great and never dip in quality. Yet for a show to go bad, all it takes is a bad pilot, bad first season, bad final season or even bad finale. For instance, Dexter.

So the idea that fans have to sit by anywhere between five and seven years to say “this show is bad”, is a lie. No, the premiere is supposed to set the tone and if you’re not vibing with it, it’s ok to say the show is ‘bad’ or that you didn’t like it. If you’re eating a meal and you know from that first bite that it’s bad, do you have to finish the meal before saying you’d like something else? No, that’s lunacy and is the exact way a piece of entertainment should be ingested. People only have X-amount of time on this world, why waste a single second on something that gets better EVENTUALLY?

Is Star Trek: Discovery or Star Trek: Picard bad? That’s not up to anyone else but you, the viewer, to determine. If you’re done after a season, that’s ok. It’s not your job to wade through bad seasons until it finally gets good. It’s their job to make it good from the jump. This is the Death Stranding argument, that one shouldn’t have to wait so long for things to get good. If you love what you’re getting, then that’s also great and it’s not up to the rest of the internet to convince you otherwise.