Redshirts Always Die
Fansided

7 plot changes that doomed Star Trek: Discovery before it started

Star Trek made a lot of changes to the timeline to make Discovery work, and that's why it didn't.

By Chad Porto

L-R Doug Jones as Saru and Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery, season 5, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+
L-R Doug Jones as Saru and Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery, season 5, streaming on Paramount+, 2023. Photo Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+ /
facebooktwitterreddit
Prev
2 of 8
Next

The Spore Drive

Talk about a concept that is universe-breaking. The Spore Drive eliminates space travel by allowing the Discovery to teleport to any point in the universe. You'd think that this type of technology would be widely known and commonly used in the future. Instead, it's nowhere to be seen. We now know that's because the ship jumped to the future past any established Trek canon, but you'd think if people were smart enough to create it a hundred-odd years before Star Trek: The Next Generation, that by the events of Voyager, we'd have the technology again.

Right?

It's not like these specific Federation scientists were the only ones expiramenting with this. I mean in reality, we had an entire video game plot that mirrored Discovery so much that there was a lawsuit filed for copyright infringement. That was just over the idea of the plot concept.If people were over who came up with the plot concept now, you know that alien races are developing their own instant warp engine like the Discovery had.

Just look at the space race in the 1950s and 60s. Do you think the Federation was the only one smart enough to consider a Spore Drive? That's beyond hubris. This is a core issue with the early (and later) seasons of the show; a group of people who are centuries behind the galaxy keep saving it. That makes sense.

Moreover, while it's not about the technology not making sense for the era that it's in, the Spore Drive is just a broken gimmick, developed by writers who wanted their show to be seen as the "best" show of the time period. It felt like the ideas they came up with weren't about making the show good but about making their show better than any other show. It felt like they were in a one-way competition to have the coolest, best, most sophisticated stuff; even if it broke the established timeline.

It felt like the writers tried to preemptively win any "what ship is best" arguments on Twitter and came up with the Spore Drive as the winning retort.

Home/Star Trek: Discovery