It's been a frenetic few weeks of watching culturally significant TV shows and movies, to avoid too many spoilers and so forth, so while I could be finishing Game of Thrones and reviewing that, or giving my thoughts on Avengers: Endgame (which I quite enjoyed!), here I am, talking about Season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery. Those others will just have to wait, I suppose.
Like with the first season, I watched S2 on Netflix abroad, during my vacation. This time I watched it all in one go, effectively, over the course of three weeks, instead of splitting it between two stints abroad that were several months apart. It doesn't really have anything to do with the show's quality, but although it's nice to be able to watch all of Disco on a single three-week vacation, it makes my viewing a little frenetic. I could solve that by paying for CBS All Access, but...
Look, I'm just going to have to say it: this was a pretty disappointing season of TV. Instead of fixing or course-correcting the negative stuff from last season, the writers doubled down on their inexpert use of existing Trek tropes and their unwillingness to develop the secondary characters. And to make matters worse, they took Tilly, a character I'd singled out for praise in the first season, and turned her almost as annoying as Burnham.
There were some good aspects, of course. Even without the callbacks to the Menagerie and the Cage, it was great to see Captain Pike show up here, with Anson Mount doing a really good job of playing a good, old-fashioned Trek captain. As the hosts of Mission Log Live note, he's fairly influential but also really underdeveloped (and IMO, especially the horrible treatment he gets in the JJ Abrams movies). Here we get to see him shown as a character different from Kirk and Picard and the rest, but also able to stand up among that crowd as a good leader and a caring mentor.
This makes Michael Burnham's regression to obnoxiousness even more frustrating. It was sort of exciting to read before S1 came out that this show would focus on a crewmember other than the captain, "for once". That should have been a red flag, because if we're honest, despite the captain getting top billing in each previous show, Trek has never been focused solely on them. Kirk may have been in almost every TOS and TAS, but TNG and DS9 in particular were happy to range around the crew and introduce us to them, develop their characters, etc, so that when something happened we'd give a shit.
(More on this in a second)
The problem with Disco is that Burnham turns out to be a horrible character to hang an entire show on. She improved a bit last season, but here I found the scenes with her dragging so... fucking... much. It may not even be that she's so bad herself, but it's clearly a mistake to make everything so dependent on her, and require all these big emotional scenes to go through her.
The other character that got too much screen time, as I said, was Tilly. Last season, I said, she was the conscience of the show, reminding the crew of Starfleet's values at the moments when they were most likely to abandon those values. This season, appropriately enough, Mission Log Live ran a poll asking listeners if she was turning into Wesley Crusher 2.0. It's like whoever wrote her this season heard, possibly from someone who themselves hadn't watched the show, that she was awkward and chatty, so they had her hijack scenes instead of contribute to them.
But as far as characterization the show's greatest crime this season was against Airiam. Since early in S1 we've seen this random robot lady on the Discovery's bridge, doing whatever. We gathered at some point what her name was, and her gender, but never spent any time with her (because for whatever reason we had to be following Burnham). Then this season the alien probe infects her with a virus, so that she's set up as a potential threat. So far, so good.
It's at this point that the writers decide to fill in her backstory (kind of). We gather that she used to be fully human, and that she was in some kind of shuttle crash that killed her husband and left her in this state. Also, apparently, she was friends with Burnham and all the other characters we don't know anything about. And then they throw her out an airlock. The crew treats this as a tragedy, but why should we, the audience, give a fuck? The writers had no interest in her before this, so again, why should we? The funeral for her was bad enough, but the bad looks the crew throws at the woman who comes to take Airiam's place are just the stupidest piece of writing since Season 2 of Voyager.
One other negative, and then I'll get back to positives. There wasn't anything wrong with the Red Angel storyline per se, but the moment it appeared in the window of the Ba'ul ship were Saru and his sister were, I knew it was going to be Burnham in that suit. This was all but confirmed when Spock tried to mind-meld with it, and in his mind it changed to Burnham.
The writers might have thought they were being clever pulling the bait-and-switch where they looked like revealing that the Red Angel was actually Burnham's mom (yay, Kima from the Wire!), but then in the final episode they confirm that, yep, it was her all along, going back in time to the exact moments they needed her. Like the Airiam thing above, it's not that this is just shitty storytelling, it's also manipulative - the writers clearly have a low opinion of the audience if this is the kind of trick they play on us. Good writing isn't about being against the viewer, it's about being on their side, leading them through rather than leading them on, and not pulling pointless twists out of nowhere.
But let's get back to some positives. Once again, the show looks great, though especially in the pod-racing sequence in the first episode, and the battle sequence in the last, it feels like covering up for the myriad failings of the plot. I've already mentioned how much I enjoyed seeing Pike, but strangely I was really moved by the episode "If Memory Serves", which starts with footage from the Menagerie, complete with paper flowers and Spock in a turtleneck. For once it felt like Disco was in conversation with the previous shows, rather than using tropes its writers had heard might have appeared in the show before. If it violates canon to have Spock and Burnham travel to Talos IV, then at least it was done in a way that respects the show's history - not something you can say often about Disco.
Another positive is that ending - er, in the sense of what S3 promises, rather than the fact this whole mess mercifully came to an end. The ship and the crew travel almost a thousand years into the future, as a way to defeat the evil AI. It doesn't make loads of sense on reflection, but whatever. It promises a new milieu for the show, unencumbered by the timeline and having to maintain technology appropriate to TOS-era Trek. And it should just be interesting to see the galaxy's evolution, since so many fans have been asking for Trek that comes after TNG, DS9 and Voyager.
That said, as with all positive things there are negatives to this part of Disco, too. The main one is that business about telling the survivors they can never speak of Burnham, Control or the spore drive again. To mix some Simpsons metaphors in here, if Burnham is Poochie ("Whenever he's off-screen, the other characters should stop and ask, Where's Poochie?"), then this whole season is Armen Tamzarian - right down to the threat of launching them out of Springfield if they mention him again.
And am I really expected to believe that Discovery's stuck in the future forever? This is a show where accidents with everyday technology like transporters could send you into the past (or, you know, the Mirror Universe), so surely in S3 the writers will fuck it up again so badly that they'll find some hand-wavey way to get them back in the original timeline.
Maybe this is all too relentlessly negative a review. I kept watching, of course, because I wanted to see what happened. And escaping to the future was definitely a curveball, in a season that lacked them. In any case, I'm on social media a whole lot less, so I'll see if I can avoid the buzz about the next season, which I think might have put expectations for this one too high.
But in the meantime, Disco has failed to move up in my estimation since last season. If anything it's gone down a bit - quality-wise it's now behind some of the best parts of Enterprise for me, if still ahead of Voyager. And as a "Star Trek show", with all that entails, it really hasn't done much in that area this season either. I ended last season's review on a hopeful note, but this time I'm only hopeful that the show gets its act together - and that it holds my interest enough to be split over multiple overseas trips. Another season like this and I really won't be interested in paying for CBS All Access.
